The North Dakota attorney general’s office has filed a legal opinion arguing that District Judge Bruce Romanick did not use a “rational mental process” when he placed an injunction on the state’s trigger law protecting most preborn children from abortion.
The trigger law was intended to go into effect following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but it was immediately challenged by Red River Women’s Clinic, the state’s only abortion facility. After filing the lawsuit, the facility moved across state lines to Minnesota, leaving no abortion business in the state.
In response to the lawsuit, Romanick issued a temporary injunction against the law in August, and upheld that injunction in an October 31 ruling, stating that there was “substantial probability” that the abortion facility would succeed in its argument that abortion is a constitutionally-protected right in the state.
In his 20-page November 21 filing, Attorney General Drew Wrigley argued in favor of the preborn protections, noting that Romanick was mistaken when he said that there was a “clear and obvious” answer as to whether or not the state’s constitution permits abortion.
“Such leaps in analysis do not appear to be the product of a rational mental process leading to a reasoned determination. The district court’s determination on this issue is diminished and unsupported by its own analysis and admission that the ‘answer to whether the statute is constitutional is not obvious,’” Wrigley wrote.
Though it no longer operates in the state, the abortion facility issued its own filing, praising Romanick’s ruling. “Similarly, it is in the public interest to maintain the preliminary injunction while the case progresses,” the facility’s attorneys wrote. “Keeping the preliminary injunction in place allows patients to continue to access emergency medical care within North Dakota; indeed, as the district court recognized, if the abortion ban were to take effect, physicians may be chilled from performing abortions even in a life-threatening situation.”
Though the abortion facility claims that the state’s law prevents women from receiving life-saving medical care, this is simply not true and is a scare tactic that has been overtly pushed by the abortion industry since the overturn of Roe. If the mother’s life is truly threatened, doctors can perform a preterm delivery. This is not an abortion if the intent is to save the mother’s life.
