The United States White House has on Saturday frowned at a court ruling which had been made in Arizona that also imposes a near-complete ban on all the abortions in the southwestern United States state while describing it as “catastrophic, dangerous and unacceptable.”
It had been reported that on Friday, a judge in Arizona’s Pima County had also made a ruling that the stricter ban which had also been first imposed in 1864, before Arizona was a state — must be enforced.
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“If this decision stands, health care providers would face imprisonment of up to five years for fulfilling their duty of care; survivors of rape and incest would be forced to bear the children of their assaulters; and women with medical conditions would face dire health risks,” spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The Arizona decision had also sparked some serious outrage from some of the other abortion providers and seemed sure to propel the thorny issue further into debate ahead of nationwide midterm elections in November.
The ruling “has the practical and deplorable result of sending Arizonans back nearly 150 years,” Brittany Fonteno, president of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement. “No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom.”
The ruling from Judge Kellie Johnson had come in a controversial case which had been filed in Arizona while they had been seeking clarification after the United States Supreme Court in June overturned the constitutional right to abortion but left it to the states to set new parameters.
The 1864 ban in Arizona, which permits abortions only when a woman’s life is in danger, had been blocked by injunction since 1973, when the US high court first found there was a constitutional right to abortion.
“We applaud the court for upholding the will of the legislature and providing clarity and uniformity on this important issue,” he said in a statement, the AZCentral.com news website reported.
Planned Parenthood had argued before Johnson that a number of abortion-related laws passed in Arizona since 1973 effectively created a right to abortion, but the judge disagreed.
