Judge Allows Abortion Clinics to Remain Open in Utah for Now

A Utah state judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a new law, one day before it was scheduled to take effect, that would have banned abortion clinics and potentially put a halt to most abortions in the state.

Abortion is legal in Utah up to 18 weeks of pregnancy, and after that only in limited circumstances. But legislators have been trying in recent years to further restrict the procedure. A state law which would ban nearly all abortions is suspended while the Utah Supreme Court considers whether abortion is protected in the Constitution.

While the more stringent ban is temporarily blocked by the legal challenge, the Legislature, dominated by Republicans, passed another bill known as H.B. 467 that was signed into law by the Republican governor and zeroed in on something else: abortion clinics, where 95 percent of all abortions are performed in the state.

Among other provisions, the law makes it a crime to provide abortion anywhere other than a hospital. Abortion clinics would lose their licenses if they performed the procedure. And even if they stopped performing abortions, no new licenses would be issued after May.

The law, signed by Gov. Spencer Cox in March, was scheduled to take effect on Wednesday. The Planned Parenthood Association of Utah — which runs three of the state’s four clinics — sued, arguing that the law would all but eliminate abortion, and that it was designed to circumvent the pending case on the more stringent ban.

On Tuesday, Judge Andrew H. Stone of Utah’s Third Judicial District agreed with Planned Parenthood. In his 22-page ruling, he wrote that the organization had offered evidence suggesting that abortion clinics had been unreasonably singled out, and that the state’s rationale for the new law was “nebulous.”