LEXINGTON, Ky. — Continuing his dogged pursuit to enforce Kentucky’s abortion ban, Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron late Thursday asked a higher court to overturn a July 22 ruling that prevents his office from enforcing the trigger law.
In a 56-page filing petitioning the Kentucky Court of Appeals for emergency relief, Cameron issued a biting rebuke of Jefferson Circuit Judge Mitch Perry for blocking the state’s abortion ban, calling his judgment “egregiously wrong.”
“Less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, a single circuit judge has created Kentucky’s version of Roe v. Wade,” Cameron wrote of the landmark precedent that codified the right to an abortion for 50 years and the case that nullified it.
The injunction, he continued “threatens to plunge Kentucky’s courts into a political firestorm that will inevitably erode the integrity and independence of the judiciary. Courts do not make public policy.”
The attorney general wants to overrule Perry’s order blocking enforcement of the state’s trigger law, which went into effect immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month. The trigger law, as it’s written, bans all abortions except when a pregnant person faces a risk of death; there are no exceptions for rape or incest. The injunction also halts a six-week ban on abortions, sometimes known as the “Heartbeat Law.”
Perry, in his similarly strongly-worded injunction, repudiated the high court and Cameron for valuing the life of fetuses over pregnant people. “The fundamental right for a woman to control her own body free from governmental interference outweighs a state interest in potential fetal life before viability,” he wrote.
The injunction will stay in place while a lawsuit from Kentucky’s two abortion providers challenging the merits of both laws plays out in court. Planned Parenthood and EMW Women’s Surgical Center argue that a right to an abortion is protected by the Kentucky Constitution, which Perry appeared to agree with.
Cameron is opposed to this argument.
“On this point, the Attorney General will not mince words: the claim that Kentucky’s Constitution protects abortion is wholly detached from anything that resembles ordinary legal reasoning or analysis,” Cameron wrote. The “alleged harm here — an infringement on the right to abortion — is nonexistent.”
This is a point Perry took up in his injunction, too.
“The Constitution must protect more than just the words explicitly enumerated on the page in order for the purpose behind the words to have effect,” Perry wrote July 22. “To hold otherwise ignores the realities of how constitutions, and laws more generally, are written.”
This is the second time Cameron has asked the state Court of Appeals to intercede on a lower court’s ruling blocking the trigger law. Earlier this month, after Perry issued a temporary restraining order halting the law and keeping abortion legal, Cameron sought emergency relief from the Court of Appeals and then the U.S. Supreme Court. Both courts denied his requests.
Relying again on the argument he previously made challenging a restraining order Perry issued blocking the law, before his July 22 injunction, Cameron told the Court of Appeals that the order prohibiting him from enforcing a duly enacted law causes “irreparable harm to the public and government.”
A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, representing EMW in its lawsuit, said Kentucky “deserves better than extremist politicians who will risk Kentuckians’ bodily autonomy to score cheap political points.”
“Attorney General Cameron has already tried and failed twice to reinstate these abortion bans. We hope the Court of Appeals continues to see the importance of maintaining the status quo for Kentuckians as our lawsuit plays out in court.”
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