Arizona Supreme Court's Abortion Ruling Shows Conservatives For What They Truly Are

Republicans have long crowed that they are the party of freedom, individual liberty and small-government conservatism.

Arizona’s abortion ruling shows that they’re anything but.

Arizona — one of the most important states on the political map — could soon have one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, based on a law that was passed before Arizona was a state, all because those same small-government conservatives decided to use government to tell women what they’re permitted to do with their bodies.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday in favor of an 1864 law banning abortion in all cases, at any stage of pregnancy, except when it’s necessary to save the mother’s life. No exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

It would supersede the 15-week abortion ban passed by the state legislature and signed into law in March 2022.

The law goes into effect 14 days hence, but the state’s attorney general said she won’t enforce it.

The ruling, a 4-2 decision, came just a day after Donald Trump stumbled through a feeble attempt to define his own abortion policy: He said he supported leaving the issue up to the states, while in the same announcement, took credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, wiping out a 50-year-precedent for legal abortion nationwide.

“We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature’s judgment, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens,” Arizona Justice John Lopez wrote. (All the justices were appointed by a Republican governor.)

But the court decided that the state’s 15-week ban was no longer valid because it was “predicated entirely on the existence of a federal constitutional right to an abortion” — under Roe — that