RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A federal judge ruled Friday that a provision of North Carolina abortion law requiring doctors to document the location of a pregnancy before prescribing abortion pills should be permanently blocked, saying it is too vague to be reasonably enforced.
Implementation of the requirement was already halted last year by U.S. District Judge Katherine Eagles, pending further hearings in a lawsuit challenging parts of the abortion law that will be enacted by the Republican-controlled state Legislature in 2023. Eagles has now said she expects a permanent injunction will be issued at some point.
But Eagles on Friday reinstated another provision he had previously blocked that would have required abortions to be performed in a hospital after 12 weeks of pregnancy. In light of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, lawmakers “only need to provide reasonable inferences about legislative decisions to regulate abortion,” he wrote.
In the lawsuit, lawmakers argued that requiring hospital births would protect maternal health by reducing the risks to some women who may experience serious complications after 12 weeks, Eagles said. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and the doctors who originally filed the lawsuit presented “credible and largely uncontroversial medical and scientific evidence” that requiring hospital births “would make abortions unnecessarily dangerous and expensive for many women,” Eagles added.
But “plaintiffs have not denied every conceivable basis the Legislature might have had for enacting the hospitalization mandate,” Eagles, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, wrote in vacating the preliminary injunction against the hospitalization mandate.
Unlike lawsuits in other states, such as South Carolina and Florida, which sought to repeal abortion laws outright, Eagles' decision means that most of North Carolina's abortion laws updated since the end of Roe v. Wade remain in place. Republican state lawmakers overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto, putting the law into effect in May 2023. The law significantly narrowed abortion access from the previous ban in most states after 20 weeks to the current ban after 12 weeks. The hospital requirement applies to exceptions to the ban after 12 weeks, such as in cases of rape, incest, or “life-threatening” fetal abnormalities.
The Eagles confirmed Friday that they would block a provision in the abortion law that would require doctors to document the “intrauterine location of the pregnancy” before prescribing a medication abortion.
Lawyers for House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger, who defended the bill, argued that the document was intended to protect the health of women with ectopic pregnancies, which can be dangerous and, if they rupture, can cause symptoms similar to those expected from a medical abortion, the brief argued.
But Eagles wrote that the drugs administered in a medication abortion do not increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy complications, and he believes the law is unconstitutionally vague and leaves abortion physicians open to lawsuits and penalties when the pregnancy is too new to see the fetus's position on an ultrasound.
This provision “violates plaintiffs' constitutional due process rights,” she wrote.
Planned Parenthood spokesmen Berger and Moore did not respond to emails seeking comment late Friday. The Eagles can still appeal the final ruling.
State Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat who supports abortion rights and is running for governor in 2024, is a formal defendant in the lawsuit, but lawyers from his office generally agreed with Planned Parenthood's arguments and urged the Eagles to block two of the provisions.
The lawsuit, originally filed in June 2023, included other challenges to the abortion law that Congress quickly addressed with new legislation. Eagles issued a preliminary injunction last September blocking the two provisions still at issue on Friday. Eagles said last month he would make a final decision on the case without a full trial.
Most southern states have laws in place that ban or nearly ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — before many women even know they're pregnant — so North Carolina remains a destination for many out-of-state women seeking abortions.
