Judge Strikes Down Mississippi's Awful Abortion Ban, Calls It 'Pure Gaslighting'

“The record is clear: States may not ban abortions prior to viability,” said U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves in his ruling striking down the ban. The rest of his opinion was blistering, laying bare the hypocrisies at the heart of abortion restrictions that claim to be concerned with women’s health.

The state of Mississippi insists that the 15-week ban “was passed in furtherance of the State’s legitimate interest in protecting the health of women,” Judge Reeves wrote. But, given the sobering reality of maternal care in the state, “the Court concludes that the Mississippi Legislature’s professed interest in ‘women’s health’ is pure gaslighting.”

“The State ‘ranks as the state with the most [medical] challenges for women, infants, and children’ but is silent on expanding Medicaid,” he continued, citing a Newsweek article from earlier this year. “Its leaders are proud to challenge Roe but choose not to lift a finger to address the tragedies lurking on the other side of the delivery room: our alarming infant and maternal mortality rates.”

“The real reason we are here is simple,” he wrote. “The State chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.” He concluded the opinion by writing that men deciding the fate of women’s right to reproductive health is a “sad irony.”