CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, along with 17 other state attorneys general, filed an amicus brief Monday 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,” Attorney General Morrisey said. “In this case, the people spoke through their representatives and that needs to be upheld.”
In the brief, the attorneys general focused on standing and urged that the court should “hold that abortion providers lack third-party standing to challenge laws regulating or restricting abortions, like the Heartbeat Act challenged here.”
The attorneys general noted that the U.S. Supreme Court recently 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 attorneys general clarified that, “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 explained that giving abortion providers standing was one such distortion, saying 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.”
Attorney General Morrisey joined in the brief with attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carrolina, South Dakota, Texas and Utah.