LITTLE ROCK, March 4, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The Arkansas legislature has given final approval to a bill that would completely ban abortions except to save a mother’s life, though it remains to be seen whether Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson will sign it into law.
The state House voted 75-18 to pass the bill Wednesday, the Associated Press reports, a month after its passage in the state Senate. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the bill “plainly unconstitutional” and warned that “we will be seeing the state of Arkansas in court again” if it’s signed into law.
Broad abortion bans, which conflict with the Supreme Court’s “fetal viability” threshold, are generally not enacted with the expectation that they will take effect in the near term. Instead, they are enacted in hopes of provoking a legal battle that would hopefully reach the U.S. Supreme Court and instigate a review of Roe v. Wade, thereby potentially overturning decades of pro-abortion legal precedent and freeing the states to set their own abortion laws.
“It’s time for [Roe] to be overturned in the Supreme Court,” declared Republican state Rep. Mary Bentley, one of the bill’s sponsors.
Such a case would present the
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