Alabama’s near-total ban on abortion has just been blocked from implementation. The ban, dubbed the “Human Life Protection Act,” was set to take effect on November 15.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the ban on Tuesday morning, effectively halting the law from taking effect while the lawsuit challenging the ban continues.
“This is not only a victory for the people of Alabama — it’s a victory for the entire nation,” said Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast, in a statement emailed to CBS News. “We said it from the start: this ban is blatantly unconstitutional and we will fight it every step of the way.”
In the 17-page opinion, Myron H. Thompson, a federal judge for the Middle District of Alabama, North Division, wrote that enforcing the ban would cause “serious and irreparable harm.”
“A near-total ban imposes substantial costs on women, including those who are unable to obtain an abortion and those who ‘desperately seek to exercise their ability to decide whether to have a child’ and thus ‘would take unsafe measures to end their pregnancies,'” Thompson wrote, quoting from another Alabama-based abortion lawsuit from 2014, Planned Parenthood Southeast v. Strange.
The Alabama attorney general’s office did not immediately return a call requesting comment.
The law, passed in May, would ban all abortions in the state except when “abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk” to the woman, according to the bill’s text. There is no exception for cases of rape or incest. It criminalizes the procedure, reclassifying abortion as a Class A felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison for doctors.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
