North Dakota Judge Strikes Down State's Abortion Ban

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A state judge struck down North Dakota’s ban on abortion Thursday, saying that the state constitution creates a fundamental right to access abortion before a fetus is viable.

In his ruling, state District Judge Bruce Romanick also said that the law violates the state constitution because it is too vague.

Romanick was ruling on a request from the state to dismiss a 2022 lawsuit filed against the ban by what at the time was the sole abortion clinic in North Dakota. The clinic has since moved across the border to Minnesota, and the state argued that a trial wouldn’t make a difference. The judge had canceled a trial set for August.

Romanick cited how North Dakota Constitution’s guarantees “inalienable rights,” including “life and liberty.”

“The abortions statutes at issue in this case infringes on a woman’s fundamental right to procreative autonomy, and are not narrowly tailored to promote women’s health or to protect unborn human life,” Romanick wrote in his 24-page order. “The law as currently drafted takes away a woman’s liberty and her right to pursue and obtain safety and happiness.”

Romanick was first elected a district judge in heavily-GOP North Dakota in 2000 and has been reelected every six years since, most recently in 2018. Before he was a judge, he was an assistant state’s attorney in Burleigh County, home to the state capital of Bismarck.

The judge acknowledged in his ruling that in the past, the North Dakota courts had previously relied on federal court precedents on abortion, but said those state precedents had been “upended” by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban abortion under the U.S. Constitution.

Romanick said he’d been left with