Woman who sued over Kentucky’s abortion bans asks court to dismiss her case
The first pregnant Kentuckian to sue over the state’s restrictive abortion laws has asked a judge to dismiss her case.
Attorneys for Jane Doe, an anonymous resident who was eight weeks pregnant when she filed a class-action lawsuit on Dec. 8 challenging the constitutionality of Kentucky’s trigger law and six-week ban, filed a motion to dismiss her case.
“Plaintiffs voluntarily dismiss this action,” according to the filing submitted to a Jefferson County circuit judge Monday morning.
No other details were immediately available.
Though Doe was pregnant at the time she filed, last week she learned during an ultrasound that her embryo no longer had fetal cardiac activity. But that fact shouldn’t have necessarily precluded her from continuing on as a plaintiff, legal experts who spoke to the Herald-Leader said.
Doe’s attorneys laid blame on the Kentucky Supreme Court for ruling earlier this year that abortion providers cannot sue on behalf of their patients, leaving the responsibility to challenge state abortion laws to individuals like Doe, who are already difficult positions.
“The Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year to take away health care providers’ ability to raise the rights of their patients has backed Kentuckians into a corner,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky said in a statement Monday.
“The court’s decision has forced Kentuckians seeking abortion to bring a lawsuit while in the middle of seeking time-sensitive health care, a daunting feat, and one that should not be necessary to reclaim the fundamental right to control their own bodies. But we won’t stop fighting.”
Doe earlier this month asked a judge to block enforcement of the state’s trigger law and six-week ban. Those laws, which prohibit abortion after six weeks of pregnancy unless it’s necessary to save the life of a pregnant person, violate her constitutional right to privacy and bodily autonomy, she argued.
In a statement soon after she filed, Jane Doe called herself a “proud Kentuckian, and I love the life and family I have built here. But I am angry that now that I am pregnant and do not want to be, the government is interfering in my private matters and blocking me from having an abortion.”
She and other pregnant women who wish to no longer be pregnant are “suffering medical, constitutional and irreparable harm because they are denied the ability to obtain an abortion,” her attorneys wrote in the initial 52-page filing.
Doe was the first person in Kentucky, and only the second adult woman since Roe v. Wade in 1973, to ask a court to intervene on her behalf and allow her to terminate her pregnancy. The commonwealth banned all abortions in June 2022 after Roe was overturned.
This breaking story will be updated.
This story was originally published December 18, 2023 at 9:31 AM.
