The Arizona (crAZy) State Supreme Court has dusted off an 1864 law that will allow the state to criminalize ALL abortions except when a mother’s life is at stake. That means that in the event of rape or incest, too bad; a woman must carry her rapist or relative’s baby to term. The 1864 law laid dormant following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion. We all know how the Extreme Court ruled in the Dobb’s case and now we see the ramifications and results of their ruling.
CrAZy’s high court based their ruling on a review of a 2022 decision by the state Court of Appeals that said doctors couldn’t be charged for performing the procedure in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy but…that’s about to change.
In June 2022, then state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, persuaded a state judge in Tucson to lift the block on enforcing the 1864 law. Brnovich’s Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes, had urged the state’s high court to side with the Court of Appeals and hold the 1864 law in abeyance.
“Today’s decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state,” Mayes said Tuesday.
