The Arizona State Senate voted 16 to 14 to repeal an abortion ban dating back to 1864, leaving it to Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs to sign the repeal into law, which she has committed to do, reported Jurist.
The State Senate’s debate was contentious, with lawmakers
delivering theatrical monologues frequently punctuated by cries of protest in
the gallery.
The vote follows a ruling by Arizona’s Supreme Court that the
159-year-old law banning abortion was enforceable in the aftermath of the US
Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion rights
case Roe v Wade, sending a 52-year-old case back to trial court.
The Arizona State House took up and passed the bill to
repeal the ban, HB2677, two weeks following the state Supreme Court’s ruling,
sending the bill to the State Senate.
Arizona’s abortion ban was enacted shortly after it was
designated as a US territory and decades before it attained statehood.
The ban was part of the Howell
Code, a comprehensive set of laws enacted by the territory’s First
Legislative Assembly, encompassing procedural regulations and establishing
criminal laws ranging from bigamy to duels to mayhem.
That code stated, in relevant part:
Every person who shall administer or cause to be
administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause to be
used any instruments whatever, with the intention to procure the miscarriage of
any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be
punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two
years nor more than five years.
The 1864 version provided an exception if a physician were
to perform an abortion in order to save the mother’s life. The following year,
the provision was amended slightly to stipulate that the life-saving exception
could apply to anyone performing an abortion. The regulation has remained
largely unchanged since 1865, and the near-total abortion ban was codified into
Arizona state law in the early 20th century.
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