North Dakota asked a state district judge on Wednesday to temporarily halt his recent ruling against the state’s abortion ban.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in June 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, which removed federal protections for abortion and left it up to the states to decide, over two dozen states created some type of abortion ban, including North Dakota.
Under North Dakota’s 2023 ban, abortion is a felony except when the procedure is done to prevent a pregnant patient’s death or a “serious health risk.” In cases of rape or incest, abortion is allowed up to six weeks, which is before many people know they are pregnant, according to Planned Parenthood.
The Red River Women’s Clinic—an abortion clinic that used to be the only one in North Dakota before it moved from Fargo to neighboring Moorhead, Minnesota, soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned—and several doctors have challenged North Dakota’s abortion ban as unconstitutionally vague for physicians and its health exception as too narrow.
North Dakota asked Judge Bruce Romanick in July, about a month before a scheduled trial, to throw out the lawsuit and the plaintiffs asked him to let the trial proceed. Romanick decided to cancel the trial and later found the abortion ban unconstitutional, but has not issued a final judgment yet.
Last week, Romanick ruled that the abortion ban “is unconstitutionally void for vagueness,” and that pregnant patients in North Dakota have a fundamental right to abortion before the fetus is viable under the state constitution.
“The Court is left to craft findings and conclusions on an issue of vital public importance when the longstanding precedent on that issue no longer exists federally, and much of the North Dakota precedent on that issue relied on the federal precedent now upended — with relatively no idea how the appellate court in this state will address the issue,” Romanick wrote in his ruling.
Brad Nygaard/The Bismarck Tribune via AP
The state then asked for a stay in the case, pending an appeal of his ruling to the state Supreme Court in a filing on Wednesday.
“A stay is warranted until a decision and mandate has been issued by the North Dakota Supreme Court from the appeal that the State will be promptly pursuing. Simply, this case presents serious, difficult and new legal issues,” state attorneys said.
Center for Reproductive Rights Senior Counsel Marc Hearron said on Tuesday that the plaintiffs would oppose any stay in the case.
“Look, they don’t have to appeal, and they also don’t have to seek a stay because, like I said, this decision is not leading any time soon to clinics reopening across the state,” he said.
Hearron continued: “We’re talking about standard-of-care, necessary, time-sensitive health care, abortion care generally provided in hospitals or by maternal-fetal medicine specialists, and for the state to seek a stay or to appeal a ruling that allows those physicians just to practice medicine I think is shameful.”
Meanwhile, Republican state Senator Janne Myrdal, who introduced North Dakota’s abortion ban, said she’s confident the state’s Supreme Court will overturn Romanick’s ruling and called his decision one of the poorest legal decisions she has read.
“I challenge anybody to go through his opinion and find anything but ‘personal opinions,'” she said on Monday.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.