Federal Judge rules in lawsuit challenging constitutionality of NC S.B. 20

A federal judge struck down one requirement of North Carolina’s abortion law, Senate Bill 20, while upholding a different requirement of the law in the same ruling on July 26. 

Chief District Judge Catherine Eagles struck down the requirement that providers document the existence or probable existence of an intrauterine pregnancy before a medical abortion, holding that it was too vague to be reasonably enforced and therefore violates the plaintiffs’ due process rights.

“The issue with that is that sometimes people are so early in their pregnancy that a location cannot be definitively identified,” Planned Parenthood South Atlantic spokesperson Molly Rivera said. “The impact of that means that abortion providers can continue to provide medication abortion to patients seeking this in very early stages of their pregnancy.” 

However, Eagles upheld the requirement that surgical abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy be performed in a hospital, which she said does not violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to equal protection or due process.

The North Carolina General Assembly passed S.B. 20 in 2023, following the United States Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Alongside the provisions struck down and upheld by Eagles in July, S.B. 20 includes a ban on abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy with few exceptions, 72 hour waiting periods for an abortion and the imposition of civil and criminal sanctions and penalties for the laws’ violation. 

The named plaintiffs, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Beverly Gray, an obstetrician and gynecologist, challenged the constitutionality of the hospital requirement and the intrauterine pregnancy provision in S.B. 20. 

“It seemed like a very simple decision for me to be involved in this case,” Gray said. “To really stand up for evidence-based medicine, to stand up for the care that I think my patients deserve – the care that people in North Carolina deserve, and it was really a mechanism to gain clarity and to also stand up and say, some parts of the law are unconstitutional and unreasonable.”

Defendants North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger joined the case and argued that they have an interest in upholding state statutes intended to protect unborn life, promote maternal health and regulate the medical profession.

Moore and Berger did not respond to emails from The Daily Tar Heel seeking comment.

Maxine Eichner, a UNC law professor, said with the state of constitutional law after the Dobbs decision, Eagles’ ruling is not unreasonable.

“She acknowledged in the ruling that the legislature's rationale for requiring that abortions after 12 weeks be performed in the hospital is weak, with very little medical justification for them,” she said. “Nevertheless, given that Dobbs said that abortion is no longer a fundamental constitutional right, (...) it's rational basis scrutiny, and as the Supreme Court has interpreted rational basis scrutiny, almost any reason that isn't completely outlandish will justify a law.”

Before S.B. 20, patients were able to come to a clinic setting to receive abortion care at a much more affordable rate than a hospital, Rivera said. Additionally, she said that in many counties across the state, there aren’t hospitals or providers trained to administer this kind of care. 

The requirement that patients receive care in hospitals causes a delay in medical care and forces patients to deal with unexpected costs, Rivera said. She said these burdens will fall particularly hard on working people, people of color, young people and those who live in rural areas.

Simran Singh Jain is an abortion doula based in Durham, where she supports patients emotionally through the abortion process.

She said that as abortion law changes, it causes a lot of confusion, and people are so scared of violating the law that they aren’t able to truly process their experience. 

“Abortion can be an emotional thing, and that is normal and natural and so people are no longer getting the opportunity to process what is a vulnerable moment, because they're trying to deal with all that confusion,” Jain said.

Eichner said that although widespread pushback has affected North Carolina legislation — largely in that legislators passed a 12 week ban, instead of a heartbeat ban — she said North Carolinians can expect more attempts to restrict abortion access. 

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