New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman [official profile] took steps [legal opinion, PDF] on Wednesday towards allowing late-term abortions in New York. Schneiderman claims [press release] that Supreme Court [official website] rulings allow late-term abortions in cases where the mother’s health is in jeopardy or the fetus suffers a fatal complication. He argues that the 1970 state law, which prohibits abortions past 24 weeks unless the mother’s life is in jeopardy, does not fall in line with Roe v. Wade [opinion]. The legal opinion written from Schneiderman gives hospital and clinics legal backing to perform such abortions even while the state law remains. Until now, women seeking or requiring such abortions often had to leave the state to receive them. Opponents to the opinion claim [NYT report] that the opinion provides “abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy.”

Abortion in general continues to be a highly controversial subject in the US. In July a US district judge issued a preliminary injunction [JURIST report] against a law intended to cut state funding to clinics administering abortions. That same week a federal judge placed an injunction [JURIST report] on an Indiana law that would have banned women from seeking abortion procedures when they are based on race, sex, or the potential for or actual diagnosis of a disability in the fetus. Recently the US Supreme Court ruled [opinion, PDF] 5-3 in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt [SCOTUSblog materials] that a Texas law [HB2 text] imposing certain requirements on abortion clinics and doctors creates an undue burden on access to abortion, and is therefore unconstitutional [JURIST report]. A collection of Texas abortion providers challenged provisions of HB2 requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital and requiring abortion clinics to conform to state standards for ambulatory surgical centers on the grounds that such requirements violated the Fourteenth Amendment as interpreted by the Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey [text]. The Indiana statute contained a similar “admitting privilege” provision.