BATON ROUGE, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Abortion services have resumed at the Shreveport clinic at the center of a lawsuit over Louisiana’s abortion trigger laws after a district judge in Baton Rouge on Tuesday temporarily blocked enforcement of the state’s near-total ban on abortion.
“Frankly, we’re delighted and the women who are now scheduling and coming in are absolutely relieved,” said Kathaleen Pittman, director of the Hope Medical Group for Women. “We’ve had to postpone women for so long because of the backlog coming out of Texas, so we were already running behind on appointments before we got the Supreme Court ruling.”
It is the second time the Center Reproductive Rights, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the clinic, has won a temporary restraining order preventing the state from enforcing the law.
The suit originated in New Orleans, where a judge issued a temporary order blocking enforcement on June 27, just three days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its 1973 ruling establishing nationwide abortion rights.
But a second New Orleans judge sent the case to Baton Rouge earlier this month (July 8), saying state law required that it be heard in the capital. Judge Ethel Julien then said that because the case was no longer going to be heard in her court, she did not have the authority to extend the temporary restraining order blocking the law’s enforcement.
On Tuesday, Judge Donald Johnson’s order once again halted enforcement temporarily while lawyers for the Shreveport clinic and other supporters of abortion rights pursue their lawsuit challenging the legislation. Johnson set a hearing for next Monday.
“We’re hoping that a preliminary injunction will be put in place,” Pittman said Wednesday. “For now, we are going to help as many women as we possibly can.”
Pittman says the clinic has been reaching out to patients who had to postpone appointments following the Supreme Court ruling and after the state law was blocked the first time.
“We started off with the patients whose procedures had been postponed. And then we started reaching out to patients who had scheduled consults, and we’re bringing them in now. We’re now going about our business as usual.”
Pittman says she and clinic staff are very relieved to be able to resume abortion care.
“Because it’s been very stressful for the staff to call these women and tell them, ‘We can’t see you right now,’ and we’re looking at women who are in crisis and one moment, we can help them, the next week, we aren’t able to. So, it’s a relief, more than anything.”
State Attorney General Jeff Landry criticized the ruling in a series of posts on Twitter.
“To have the judiciary create a legal circus is disappointing,” Landry wrote in one post.
“The rule of law must be followed, and I will not rest until it is. Unfortunately, we will have to wait a little bit longer for that to happen,” he added.
Louisiana’s two other clinics are in the capital, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs don’t deny that the state can now ban abortion as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, but they say current state law is unconstitutionally vague. They contend that Louisiana now has multiple, conflicting trigger mechanisms in the law. They also argue that the state law is unclear on whether it bans an abortion prior to a fertilized egg implanting in the uterus.
And while the law provides an exception for “medically futile” pregnancies in cases of fetuses with fatal abnormalities, the plaintiffs note it gives no definition of the term and that state health officials haven’t yet provided a list of conditions that would qualify. The suit claims the state law is unclear on when the ban takes effect and on medical exceptions to it.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
