Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Six-Week Ban Appeal

A bipartisan majority of the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed an appeal related to the state’s six-week ban on abortion, due to “a change in law.”

The case was an appeal on behalf of the state of Ohio, asking the court to lift a pause on the six-week abortion ban, which had been instituted by the Hamilton County Court of Appeals.

That court is still considering a lawsuit that will ultimately decide the fate of the ban itself. Most recently, the ACLU and reproductive health clinics across the state submitted a request to eliminate the six-week ban based on the passage of Issue 1.

The change of law was not specified in the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling, but challengers of the six-week abortion ban asked the high court to dismiss the case in a similar way as the common pleas court on Dec. 7, the day the Ohio Constitution was officially amended to add abortion rights and other reproductive health rights to Article 1.

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Issue 1 passed in the November general election with 57% of the vote.

“There can be no ‘presumption’ of constitutionality here — the Ohio Constitution precluded such a presumption prior to the amendment,” attorneys for abortion rights advocates wrote in a brief to the court on that day. “And now it is indisputable.”

Janet Folger Porter, president and founder of Faith2Action Ministries and self-identified “architect of the Heartbeat Law,” the nickname for the six-week ban used by supporters, argued that Issue 1 is “fundamentally unconstitutional and an assault on the inalienable right to life” in her own brief to the court.

“As our founders proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence, we were created equal, not born equal,” she wrote.

The state’s high court released the 5-2 majority decision without further comment on the ruling.

Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy led the majority, which also included justices Patrick Fischer, Patrick DeWine, Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart.

Justice Jennifer Brunner dissented with the majority decision but said she would have dismissed the appeal because it should not have been accepted in the first place.

Only one member of the court, Judge Matthew Byrne, dissented while saying he would “proceed with addressing the propositions of law previously accepted for review.”

Byrne, of the 12th District Court of Appeals, was standing in for Justice Joseph Deters, who recused himself from the case due to his previous position as Hamilton County Prosecutor.

This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.