Dakota court review

North Dakota law protects unborn babies from abortion throughout pregnancy. But the statute explicitly allows for abortions to “prevent the death or a serious health risk to the pregnant female.” For abortion advocates, though, that exception is not enough.

Now the North Dakota Supreme Court will determine whether the law stands or falls. The high court heard oral arguments March 25 in a case brought by abortion businesses challenging the law’s constitutionality.

The state has been unable to enforce its broad protections for the unborn since last September, when a state district court judge ruled the law infringed on a woman’s right to abort before the baby is viable. North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court, saying the lower court overstepped its authority by declaring a right to abortion in the state constitution. Lawyers for abortionists argue Republican legis­lators knew the law would raise constitutional questions when they passed it in 2023.

North Dakota is politically conservative, but a pro-life win at the state’s Supreme Court isn’t guaranteed. The court two years ago ruled against another pro-life law that allowed physicians to perform an abortion only to prevent a pregnant woman’s death, not to preserve her physical health. After Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, Red River Women’s Clinic, the state’s only brick-and-mortar abortion facility, moved to Minnesota and joined a lawsuit challenging North Dakota’s law. The state Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the exception should be broader, saying mothers have a fundamental right to receive abortions to preserve both their life and health.

Even after the North Dakota legislature passed the 2023 abortion law and included a “serious health risk” exception, the abortion facility continued to challenge it as too narrow or vague for doctors, culminating in March’s oral arguments. The court should rule by late May or June.

Michelle Lujan Grisham Jim Weber / Santa Fe New Mexican via AP

Bankrolling abortions

A new abortion facility could open in southern New Mexico in mid-2026—with funding from the state government. Project organizers told a local reporter that construction of an abortion business in Las Cruces could begin in September or October of this year.

The government-backed effort started in 2022, when the state’s Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an executive order allocating $10 million toward a new abortion facility in Doña Ana County, where Las Cruces is the county seat. She cited the anticipated influx of abortion-­seekers to the state as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. In the first six months of 2023, 8,230 out-of-state women sought abortions in New Mexico, accounting for 74% of the state’s abortions during that period, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

In March, the New Mexico Legislature approved $10 million more to build another abortion center in the northern part of the state. New Mexico already has 11 abortion ­facilities—three in Las Cruces alone. —L.S.