ATLANTA -- The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a lower court ruling that the state's law restricting abortion was invalid, leaving limited access to abortions unchanged for now.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said last November that the ban was "unequivocally unconstitutional" because it was enacted in 2019, when Roe v. Wade allowed abortions well past six weeks. Georgia's law bans most abortions after roughly six weeks.
The Georgia Supreme Court in a 6-1 decision said McBurney was wrong.
"When the United States Supreme Court overrules its own precedent interpreting the United States Constitution, we are then obligated to apply the Court's new interpretation of the Constitution's meaning on matters of federal constitutional law," Justice Verda Colvin wrote for the majority.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia said in a news release the opinion disregards "long-standing precedent that a law violating either the state or federal Constitution at the time of its enactment is void from the start under the Georgia Constitution."
The group represented doctors and advocacy groups that had asked McBurney to throw out the law.
The ruling does not change abortion access in Georgia and is not the last word on the state's ban.
The state Supreme Court had previously allowed enforcement of the ban to resume while it considered an appeal of the lower court decision. The lower court judge has also not ruled on the merits of other arguments in a lawsuit challenging the ban, including that it violates Georgia residents' rights to privacy.
In its ruling on Tuesday, the state Supreme Court sent the case back to McBurney to consider those arguments.
ABORTION TRANSPORT BAN
A Texas county near New Mexico -- where abortion is legal -- has banned helping people traveling to get an abortion in one of the newest ways of trying to restrict abortion access since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
Lubbock County is the largest of four Texas counties that have now adopted a version of the measure, which would be enforced through lawsuits filed by private citizens against people who help women obtain abortions. It is the same legal mechanism Texas used to enact a strict abortion law in 2021 before the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the state last year to ban nearly all abortions entirely.
Commissioners in the west Texas county adopted the measure 3-0 at a meeting Monday, rejecting some requests to postpone the vote.
The ordinance "has many legal problems," said Lubbock County Judge Curtis Parrish, the county's top elected official. "This ordinance, however, does not have a problem with its intent or the intent of those who are passionate about this."
The measures expand on city ordinances rural Texas cities began passing in 2019 to ban abortion within their boundaries even if the cities did not have a clinic performing abortions. Critics have attacked the campaign as an effort to intimidate women to discourage them from seeking abortions in places where abortion remains legal.
No violations of the travel prohibition have been reported in the counties with similar measures already on the books. The measures would not punish women who are seeking the abortion but would present legal risks to people who help transport them to get the procedure.
The Lubbock County sheriff's office declined to comment on the ban or its implementation.
Lubbock County has about 317,000 residents and far outnumbers the population of the three other Texas counties -- Mitchell, Goliad and Cochran -- that have approved the ordinance in recent months, with each county's population counting fewer than 10,000 residents. Highways through Lubbock County run to New Mexico, which has some of the most permissive abortion laws in the U.S.
Information for this article was contributed by Sudhin Thanawala, Jeff Amy and staff writers of The Associated Press.