BISMARCK, North Dakota (LifeSiteNews) – The North Dakota Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday about the constitutionality of the state’s near-total abortion ban, with lawyers for and against debating the meaning and implications of its language about medical emergencies.
In April 2023, former Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed a law banning most abortions throughout pregnancy, with exceptions only allowed for rape or incest before the detection of a heartbeat or when allegedly “necessary” to avoid a “serious health risk” to the mother at any point before or after six weeks. The bill was meant to deal with a block the state’s highest court had placed on North Dakota’s previous abortion law, a trigger law meant to make most abortions illegal in the event of Roe v. Wade’s downfall.
District Judge Bruce Romanick blocked the more recent law in September 2024, supposedly for being “unconstitutionally void for vagueness,” and a month later rejected a request to let the law be enforced pending appeal to the state Supreme Court. That means that until the case is resolved, elective abortion can be committed in North Dakota up until fetal viability, though as a practical matter there are no stand-alone abortion centers to obtain one in the state. The plaintiff in the case, Red River Women’s Clinic, has since relocated to the Minnesota side of the state border.
During oral arguments, plaintiffs’ attorney Meetra Mehdizadeh argued that the law’s language about “serious health risks” forced doctors to “guess as to whether a patient’s health condition falls within the exception and offers prosecutors no clear guidelines to determine whether a physician guessed correctly.”
She also faulted the law for failing to include a mental health exception, as well as for neglecting the mental health implications of not being allowed to abort a baby diagnosed to not survive upon birth.
Justice Daniel Crothers questioned how a ruling that narrowed the ban’s enforceability in certain medical circumstances could be done “without engaging in the legislative process,” to which Mehdizadeh agreed that her side was in effect asking for “creating new exceptions.”
North Dakota Solicitor General Phil Axt defended the law by arguing that its actual text did not create a conflict between protecting babies and saving mothers, and that the plaintiffs were instead positing scenarios in which doctors wrongly misinterpret the law.
“Doctors might choose to read it in some way that requires them to delay care or wait until they’re at imminent risk. That’s not what the statute requires,” he said. “It simply requires a legal medical judgment if killing the child is necessary.”
Axt argued that, when a statute is alleged to be vague, courts have a duty to adopt a construction that is sufficiently clear to allow it to stand, which in this case would mean simply applying the state’s preexisting understanding of what does and does not constitute medical malpractice. He further emphasized that the statute would only apply if a doctor acted with the intention of causing the preborn child’s death.
Inforum noted that the state’s highest court declined to lift the injunction on the law in December 2024, signaling agreement with arguments about the law’s vagueness. However, two of the five justices dissented, and four must agree in order to ultimately strike down the abortion ban.
Thirteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
