On January 16, WilmerHale filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court of Georgia on behalf of Professor Anthony Michael Kreis and eleven other professors of law and history in State of Georgia v. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective et al., No. S25A0300. The brief addresses Georgians’ understanding of abortion in the 19th and 20th centuries, during the historical junctures when Georgia’s due process and equal protection clauses were first ratified and subsequently amended.
In 2019, Georgia enacted 2019 House Bill 481 (“H.B. 481”), which bans abortion after approximately six weeks of pregnancy. Plaintiffs—a coalition of Georgia-based obstetrician-gynecologists, reproductive health centers, and reproductive rights groups—filed suit in the Fulton County Superior Court, arguing that H.B. 481 violates Georgians’ rights to liberty and privacy guaranteed by the Georgia Constitution.
The amicus brief, co-written by James Dowd, Laura Powell, Sean Kim, Amanda Shoemaker and Nicolette Willis, aims to ensure that the Georgia Supreme Court has the benefit of an accurate historical perspective when considering whether H.B. 481 is consistent with the Georgia Constitution’s fundamental protections.
The professors urge the Supreme Court of Georgia to consider the complex history of abortion regulation in Georgia, including Georgia’s early adoption of the American common-law rule that imposed no restrictions on abortions before “quickening”—the point at which a pregnant person first feels fetal movement, typically at around sixteen weeks of pregnancy. The brief discusses how this common-law framework constituted the law of Georgia in 1868, when the State ratified its first operative constitution to guarantee that “[n]o person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, except by due process of law.” The brief further addresses how Georgia’s first criminal statute prohibiting abortion, enacted in 1876, came about as a result of anti-Reconstruction backlash from politically powerful elites, and the advocacy of a small cohort of physicians who sought to change public views largely for their own non-medical purposes.