Louisiana has joined Alaska, Florida, Virginia and West Virginia in striking down the “partial-birth abortion” ban that was proven unconstitutional in the recent Supreme Court decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. A federal judge has also blocked an Ohio state law that criminalized a late-term abortion procedure and although Ohio Governor Bob Taft is making continued attempts to argue the constitutionality of the law, it too is expected to be struck down as unconstitutional.
A US District Court in Colorado declared a Parental Notification Act which would have required young women to notify her parents in cases when she chose to have an abortion as a violation of a young woman’s right to choose. The act had no exception for the health of the young woman and, unlike other existing parental notification laws, it did not provide teens with a judicial bypass procedure or other alternative if they felt the could not tell a parent for fear of being abused, thrown out of the house, or harmed in any other way.
