The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R-Kentucky) may continue defending his state's ban on live dismemberment abortion even after lower courts blocked the law and Governor Andy Beshear (D-Kentucky) dropped the case.
"This is a very exciting decision from the Court and it's [among] a series of encouraging pro-life decisions that the Supreme Court has made while we await the big decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization abortion case," says Mallory Carroll, vice president of communications at Susan B. Anthony List.
The Court, by an 8-1 vote Thursday, concluded that AG Cameron can step in to defend his state's law. The lone dissenting vote was Sonia Sotomayor, a justice who Lauren Enriquez of Students for Life of America calls "an abortion radical."
"This law is something that should be basically understood by everybody as a human protection for pre-born children," says Enriquez. "Dismemberment abortion is a procedure where a child is dismembered alive, piece by piece, out of his or her mother's womb [and] the child dies of either neurological trauma or bleeding out because the child is alive when this barbaric procedure takes place."
So while there is a pro-abortion governor in the state, Enriquez says the Kentucky attorney general now has "the freedom to defend the state's pro-life law that will prohibit those procedures from taking place in the state of Kentucky."
Enriquez argues that Thursday's ruling also will impact people outside of Kentucky.
"The Dobbs v. Jackson case will reimagine or possibly reverse Roe v. Wade," she explains. "So, what's going to happen [depending on the high court's ruling] is abortion is going to go back to the states, and the states need to have a right to defend the pre-born children in their state from abortion violence."
Enriquez detects a "trend" where district attorneys and pro-abortion governors of states are preemptively saying they're not going to defend pro-life laws that pass into law – and that's why she deems the court's ruling "very, very significant."
"… Because the Supreme Court is saying Actually if you pro-abortion ideologues won't defend the laws of your own state protecting your own children from abortion violence, we are going to allow alternate representatives from your state – in this case the attorney general – to step in and do the job that they were entrusted to do and protect the children that they have sworn to protect in their state.'"
