On Tuesday the North Dakota Supreme Court upheld a 2011 law which regulates how chemical abortifacients—generically referred to as “RU486”—are administered to women. In so doing, the state’s highest court reversed a ruling by District Judge Wickham Corwin who routinely hammers pro-life laws with relish.
Tammi Kromenaker, director of North Dakota’s sole abortion provider, almost immediately told the Associated Press that the Red River Women’s Clinic has ceased performing chemical abortions at its Fargo clinic. Kromenaker has told the AP that about 20% of the 1,300 abortions the clinic performs annually are done with drugs and not surgically. Surgical abortions are still being performed.
The clinic has 14 days to petition the state Supreme Court for a rehearing before the law takes effect. David Brown, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), told reporters he couldn’t yet say whether a petition will be filed.
The fight over chemical abortions in North Dakota has a lengthy history.
According to testimony introduced at the trial, they were first performed in North Dakota in 2007.
The 2011 law (HB 1297) mandates that if a drug is used to induce abortion its label must say it is intended to be used as an abortifacient. Misoprostol is one of the two drugs that make up the RU-486 abortion regimen (along with mifepristone) but it is labeled for the treatment of stomach ulcers, not abortion.
Judge Corwin granted a temporary injunction in August 2011 and followed that up by permanently blocking the law in July 2013.
Corwin not only wrote that “No compelling state interest justifies this infringement,” he also harshly criticized a state witness saying her “opinions lack scientific support, tend to be based on unsubstantiated concerns and are generally at odds with solid medical evidence.” In fact, her credentials are impeccable. She is a respected medical doctor with years of clinical experience and also someone who has followed this issue for a number of years and published several journal articles dealing with the issue. The state then appealed Corwin’s 58-page decision to the state Supreme Court.
The CRR argued that while the law might not be an outright ban on chemical abortions (pro-abortionists call them “medication abortions”),
“it would act as a de facto ban by requiring the clinic to use an outdated protocol on the U.S Food and Drug Administration’s approved label for mifepristone, which would prevent women whose pregnancy is past 49 days from having a medication abortion,” according to Mike Nowatzki of the Forum News Service.
The case was unusual in several respects. For example, under the North Dakota state constitution, at least four (of the five) members of the court must agree that a state statute is unconstitutional.
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According to Nowatzki,
“The Supreme Court was evenly split on whether the law violated the state constitution, with Justices Mary Muehlen Maring and Carol Ronning Kapsner finding it did and Chief Justice Gerald VandeWalle and Justice Dale Sandstrom finding it didn’t. Justice Daniel Crothers concluded that the state constitutional issue didn’t need to be decided.
The justices also split on whether HB 1297 violated the federal Constitution:
“Maring, Kapsner and Crothers found the law violated the U.S. Constitution, while VandeWalle found that it wasn’t unconstitutional at the federal level. Sandstrom opined that the federal question didn’t belong before the state Supreme Court.”
Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem told Nowatzki, “I think the important thing is they did not succeed in establishing a state constitutional right to abortion, which was their goal.”
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared at National Right to Life News Today.
