By William Perkins
Editor
A three-judge panel of the Mississippi Supreme Court declined July 8 to issue a temporary injunction that would have allowed Jackson Women’s Health Organization to continue providing abortions while a lawsuit filed by the clinic winds its way through the state court system.
The panel did not grant the injunction request, but set July 25 as the date for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch to submit the state’s defense of the “trigger law” that closed down the abortion segment of the clinic’s business after the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24 overturned its 1973 decision in Roe. V. Wade that permitted abortion nationwide.
Fitch was the lead attorney who argued the state’s case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 1 of last year in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which the U.S. Supreme Court used to overturn Roe and send the abortion issue to individual states.
Judge Debbra K. Halford of the Fourth Chancery District in Liberty, appointed to hear the clinic’s case after all four Hinds Court Chancery Court judges recused themselves, declined to issue an injunction June 5 and ruled that the appropriate venue for a lawsuit involving abortion and the Mississippi Constitution is in the state Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, a pro-abortion California physician is floating the idea of anchoring an abortion clinic in the Gulf of Mexico just beyond southern states’ jurisdictional waters to ensure the procedure will remain available to women in those states.
Meg Autry, an obstetrician/gynecologist and professor at the University of California at San Francisco, told Associated Press, “There’s been an assault on reproductive rights in our country and I’m a lifelong advocate for reproductive health and choice. We have to create options and be thoughtful and creative to help people in restrictive states get the health care they deserve.”
