May 4, 2024
BATON ROUGE (AP) — The legal battle over Louisiana's statewide ban on abortion continues with a court hearing scheduled to begin Monday morning.
State District Judge Donald Johnson issued a temporary order last week blocking enforcement pending the hearing in a lawsuit that claims the state law is unconstitutionally vague.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry's office will argue that the state ban is constitutional and should no longer be blocked. Attorneys for a north Louisiana abortion clinic and other supporters of legal abortion want Johnson to keep blocking enforcement as their lawsuit plays out.
Johnson's order last week freed Louisiana's three abortion clinics, in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, to resume operations. One, Hope Medical Group for Women clinic in Shreveport, said it would continue abortion procedures. A spokeswoman for the two others said the clinics are open but would not schedule new patients until after Monday's hearing.
The statewide abortion ban, which does not have exceptions for victims of rape and incest, has taken effect twice and been blocked twice since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its historic Roe v. Wade ruling on June 24. Louisiana's law includes “trigger language” designed to make it effective when the Supreme Court reversed abortion rights.
In the suit, which originated in New Orleans, plaintiffs don’t deny that the state can now ban abortion. But they contend that Louisiana now has multiple, conflicting trigger mechanisms in the law. They also argue that the state law is unclear on whether it bans an abortion prior to a fertilized egg implanting in the uterus.
Landry, in a filing last week, argued that the law “needs only to delineate what is illegal — not define what is legal.”
“The rule of law must be followed, and I will not rest until it is,” Landry recently tweeted.
