In the days or weeks ahead, the Utah justices are expected to decide whether to maintain the lower court's hold on abortion law or take the matter into their own hands due to the state constitutional questions at stake.
The state's attorneys want the state Supreme Court to overrule a lower court's decision to put a 2020 state law banning most abortions on hold. They argued that the “original public meaning” of the state constitution drafted during the Mormon Pioneer era in 1895 didn’t guarantee a right to abortion.
In oral arguments on Tuesday, Utah’s majority-women Supreme Court appeared skeptical of the state’s claims that the lower court abused its power in putting an abortion law on hold last year.
The panel probed Utah’s attorneys about arguments that the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliate had not raised “serious issues” enough to merit delaying the law.
Many of their questions narrowed in on a 2002 abortion case that interpreted the Utah Constitution in line with the U.S. Supreme Court’s long standing view that certain limits on abortion violated people’s fundamental rights under law.
Utah is one of at least five states in which laws restricting abortion have been put on hold amid litigation. The state’s Planned Parenthood affiliate sued last year over a 2020 “trigger law,” passed by state lawmakers, that banned abortion with exceptions for maternal health threats or rape and incest reported to the police.
Since a judge put that law on hold last summer, another law, a 2019 ban on abortion after 18 weeks of pregnancy, took effect in Utah.
Lawmakers subsequently passed additional legislation striking licensing provisions for abortion clinics in an effort to phase them out and make it more difficult for courts to put laws on hold that sponsors described as a response to the trigger law.
While Judge Andrew Stone takes more time to weigh the merits of the lawsuit from the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, the Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments about the extent of his court’s power to keep it on hold.
If the law is to take effect, Utah could join 15 states enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
Only a few such bans have been struck down in the year since Roe’s overturning, including permanently blocking a ban in South Carolina on abortions after cardiac activity can be detected.
