A divided Oklahoma Supreme Court narrowly ruled on Tuesday that the state constitution protects a woman’s right to have an abortion when a doctor deems it necessary to save her life.
“We hold that the Oklahoma Constitution creates an inherent right of a pregnant woman to terminate a pregnancy when necessary to preserve her life,” read the 5-4 majority opinion (pdf), which comes with six separate concurring and dissenting opinions.
To have this “inherent right,” according to the state’s highest court, means that a woman gets to choose to end her pregnancy at any point if her physician has determined “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty or probability” that the continuation of the pregnancy will endanger the woman’s life “due to the pregnancy itself or due to a medical condition that the woman is either currently suffering from, or likely to suffer from during the pregnancy.”…