Judge dissolves injunction on four new Arkansas abortion laws

Aug. 8 (UPI) -- A federal appeals court has dissolved an injunction on four Arkansas laws imposing new requirements to obtain an abortion.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday vacated District Judge Kristine Baker's injunction put in place in 2017.

Baker's ruling blocked four laws: one that bans the second-trimester abortion procedure dilation and evacuation; a second that requires doctors to notify law enforcement when anyone 16 or younger obtains an abortion; a third that requires doctors to review a woman's medical records to ensure she isn't using the procedure as a form of sex selection if she knows the fetus's sex; and a fourth that requires a patient to notify a partner or family regarding disposal of abortion remains.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the national Center for Reproductive Rights said the ruling won't take effect for 21 days, allowing the four laws to remain blocked until Aug. 28.

"If allowed to take effect, these restrictions would completely block many people from obtaining abortion care, and would eventually leave the state with even more limited abortion care," the ACLU said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Family Council President Jerry Cox praised the ruling.

"This is a very good ruling," Cox said in a statement. "It paves the way for enforcement of these good laws. These laws protect women from dangerous surgical abortion procedures. They help prevent babies' organs from being harvested and sold to researchers. They expand the reporting requirements for underage girls. And they require abortionists to request part of a woman's medical history before performing abortions. These are good laws that never should have been blocked in the first place."

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith of Little Rock cited the Supreme Court's Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion in a landmark abortion case in June in the decision.

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's abortion law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital as unconstitutional, with the majority finding that it was an "undue burden."

Roberts concurred in the judgment, but not the majority's reasoning. He ruled in favor of striking down the Louisiana law based on court precedent from another case that struck down a similar law in Texas. However, he also noted that he believed the Texas case "was wrongly decided."

He rejected the majority's reasoning "that the undue burden standard required courts to weigh the law's asserted benefits against the burdens it imposes on abortion access."

Furthermore, Roberts said that requiring the courts to weigh in on these burdens could create a "balancing test in which unweighted factors mysteriously are weighed," and lead to arbitrary results.

"State and federal legislatures [have] wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical uncertainty," Roberts noted.