ATLANTA — Georgia can no longer enforce its ban on abortion that took effect in 2022, a Fulton County judge said Monday, allowing the procedure again to be performed in the state after a doctor detects fetal cardiac activity.

Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney issued an order Monday that said abortions must be regulated as they were before Georgia’s 2019 law took effect in July 2022 — meaning the procedure is again allowed up until about 22 weeks of pregnancy.

“A review of our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her health care choices,” McBurney ruled. “That power is not, however, unlimited. When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then — and only then — may society intervene.”

The ruling comes after the state Supreme Court last year reversed a 2022 ruling from McBurney in which he said the 2019 law had been passed passed illegally since Roe v. Wade was the law of the land at the time. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which allowed abortions up until a fetus could be viable outside the mother’s body, and sent the power to regulate the procedure back to the states.

That sent the case back to McBurney, who then was asked to rule on the constitutionality of the law.

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