COLUMBUS, Ohio — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and 17 other state AGs have filed an amicus brief in Preterm Cleveland v. Ohio in the Supreme Court of Ohio, urging the court to reject the challenge to Ohio’s Heartbeat Act and uphold the will of the people.
“The U.S. Supreme Court was very clear when it overturned Roe v. Wade that the states through their elected representatives have the authority to regulate abortion,” Morrisey said of the brief filed May 8. “In this case, the people spoke through their representatives and that needs to be upheld.”
In the brief, the AGs say the court should “hold that abortion providers lack third-party standing to challenge laws regulating or restricting abortions, like the Heartbeat Act challenged here.”
They also note that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Dobbs “that Roe did not just get the U.S. Constitution wrong but also ‘distort[ed]’ ‘important’ legal rules” and “counted this decades-long distortion of basic legal rules as a strong reason to overrule Roe and set the law right.”
The AGs say “as abortion disputes have, after Dobbs, returned to the States, state courts have been urged to continue distorting the law to protect abortion.”
The coalition say giving abortion providers standing was one such distortion, arguing that it “departed from sound principles of standing, damaged the law, and hurt the court. There is no good reason for this court to engraft those problems onto Ohio law and to bring that harm to this state’s courts.”
Morrisey joined in the brief with attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Utah.
Ohio Supreme Court case number 2023-0004