PHOENIX — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes released an opinion Thursday clarifying when a medical emergency trumps the state's ban on abortions. The newly released opinion grants significant power and protections to medical professionals.
Arizona's current abortion law, enacted in 2022, bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The only exception is for a "medical emergency"; there's no exception for cases of rape or incest.
"When women had a federal constitutional right to abortion, doctors could focus on caring for their patients and what their help required. But that changed," Mayes said of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling overturning abortion rights.
What constitutes a "medical emergency'' prompted four Democratic lawmakers to ask Mayes for an expedited legal opinion.
Mayes specified two circumstances in the opinion:
- The treating physician must exercise clinical judgment — a court-recognized and "well-understood medical concept."
- The physician must determine in good faith that the patient is at risk of "substantial and irreversible" impairment to their health.
"Once a treating physician forms a good faith clinical judgement that one of the two foregoing circumstances is satisfied, the statute allows her to perform an abortion immediately and does not require her to wait for a patient to deteriorate or inch closer to death," the document read in part.
The document also specified that the treating physician cannot be prosecuted after the fact if their assessment is later reevaluated by a second party, so long as the assessment was made without malice and/or an intent to deceive.
Mayes stressed during a press conference Thursday that she would never prosecute a medical professional who provided or was involved in an abortion after deciding it was medically necessary.
"Doctors have a fear of prosecutions hanging over their heads, and that is chilling how common sense medicine should be practiced," Mayes said. "We are providing enough clarity as possible for medical professionals."
The full opinion can be read below:
This release coincided with a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that cleared Idaho hospitals to provide emergency abortions. However, that procedural ruling left critical questions about whether doctors can provide emergency abortions elsewhere unanswered.
"Doctors are every day being faced with terrible decisions about whether they can provide a medically necessary abortion to save the life of a mother," Mayes said earlier this year.
Mayes previously said an emergency room doctor had asked her, "'How close to death do I have to allow (a patient) to get before I can avoid being prosecuted under the 15-week abortion ban?' That is a crazy question for him to have to ask me."
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