The Center for Reproductive Rights, Gender Justice and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP announced Monday that they filed an amended complaint on behalf of women’s health clinic Red River Women’s Clinic, formerly based in North Dakota, challenging the state’s newly passed and signed abortion ban, SB 2150.
Meetra Mehdizadeh, Staff Attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, raised concerns over the ban’s potential negative impacts, saying:
This extreme law does nothing to protect people’s health. Instead, it has trapped healthcare providers between a rock and a hard place—uncertain over when they can provide abortion care and fearful that they could face punishment if they do. We have seen how these laws have wreaked havoc on people’s lives across the country, and are urging the court to put a stop to these harms.
The original complaint, filed in July 2022, challenged North Dakota’s “trigger ban,” an abortion ban designed to come into force if the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court overturned Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, setting North Dakota’s ban to take effect 30 days after the decision.
The North Dakota South Central Judicial District Court ruled in favor of Red River Women’s Clinic, granting a motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent the ban from taking effect while the lawsuit moves through the legal system. This decision was upheld by the North Dakota Supreme Court.
The new statewide ban only allows abortion prior to six weeks in cases of incest or abuse or if the life of the mother is at risk, classifying the performing of abortions outside these parameters as a Class C felony. One of the sponsors of the law, Senator Janne Myrdal, defended the ban on the conservative Christian radio show Washington Watch, saying “it [SB 2150] protects life from conception… these are laws that were actually on the books for about 20 years in North Dakota but of course held hostage by Roe.”
The amended filing comes soon after the University of California, San Francisco’s Care Post-Roe project published a study claiming that healthcare providers in states with abortion bans are not able to meet appropriate standards of care, hurting patients and providers. The study goes on to discuss the barriers to healthcare in these states, including financial burdens posed by out-of-state travel, inability to receive appropriate care for obstetric complications and permanent damage from unaddressed health concerns.
The Red River Women’s Clinic was forced to move to Moorhead, Minnesota, leaving North Dakota with no abortion clinics.
