[JURIST] The Superior Court of Maricopa County [official website] on Thursday struck down a 2012 Arizona law that mandated abortion pills be regulated according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [official website] as violating the state constitution. The law (HB 2036) [text, PDF] required physicians to follow FDA guidelines when prescribing the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, or RU-486, which limited prescription to women seven weeks pregnant or less. Many doctors were prescribing [AP report] the medication through the ninth week of pregnancy on a case-by-case basis. Judge Richard Gama held that the state law would have to be changed whenever the FDA changed its guidelines on the medication, and this results in an unconstitutional delegation [Arizona Republic Report] of law-making power from the state legislature to another body. HB 2036 had only been in effect for two days in 2014 before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website] instituted an injunction [text, PDF] banning implementation of the law until the state challenge was resolved.

Abortion related issues have been a heated topic of discussion for the past several years in the US. Earlier this week a group of California pregnancy clinics challenged a state law [JURIST report] that would require them to inform women coming to the clinic of the state-provided abortion services. Earlier this month the US House of Representatives [official website] approved [JURIST report] the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015, a bill that would cut all federal funding to women’s healthcare provider Planned Parenthood. In August Planned Parenthood filed a complaint [JURIST report] in the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, alleging that Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s termination of Medicaid provider agreements for the facility violates a federal law that requires Medicaid beneficiaries to have a choice in provider for family planning. Also in August the Alaska Superior Court struck down [JURIST report] a state law it says would have unfairly burdened low-income individuals by limiting Medicaid funding for abortions. Earlier that month the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee lifted [JURIST report] a temporary restraining order that limited the state in enforcing new abortion laws regarding licensing standards for clinics. In July Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed into law [JURIST report] the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, limiting the ability of a woman to seek an abortion more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy.