A West Virginia judge on July 18 temporarily blocked the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban from taking effect.
The preliminary injunction issued by Kanawha County Circuit Judge Tera Salango came in a lawsuit filed in June on behalf of Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, the state’s only abortion clinic.
The clinic had suspended abortions and consultations out of fear of prosecution under the state’s 150-year-old abortion ban, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24. The lawsuit challenges the law, seeking to block it from ever taking effect.
The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had prohibited states from banning abortions prior to when the fetus is deemed “viable”—or potentially able to live outside its mother’s womb—deemed at around the second trimester of pregnancy at 24 weeks….