ATLANTA – A Fulton County Superior Court judge Monday overturned Georgia’s “heartbeat” law banning abortion essentially after six weeks of pregnancy.

In a 26-page ruling, Judge Robert McBurney declared the law an unconstitutional violation of women’s privacy and equal protection rights.

“This dispute is fundamentally about the extent of a woman’s right to control what happens to and within her body,” McBurney wrote. “The baseline rule is clear: a legally competent person has absolute authority over her body and should brook no governmental interference in what she does — and does not do — in terms of health, hygiene, and the like.”

The Republican-controlled General Assembly passed the Living Infants and Equality (LIFE) Act in 2019 banning abortion in Georgia after a fetal heartbeat is detected. The law included exceptions for rape, incest, and “medical emergencies,” defined as a life-threatening condition or threat of irreversible physical impairment to the mother.

But federal courts blocked the law from taking effect until 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

The reproductive rights group SisterSong filed a lawsuit challenging the law and won an initial ruling by McBurney in November 2022 declaring the ban unconstitutional. However, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed McBurney’s decision a year later and remanded the case back to Fulton County Superior Court, leading to Monday’s decision.

McBurney ruled that Georgia’s law governing abortion must revert to where it stood before lawmakers passed the heartbeat legislation in 2019, which based the right to abortion on the viability of the fetus, typically between 23 and 24 weeks.

Abortion has been among the most hotly contested issues of this presidential election year. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, traveled to Atlanta Sept. 20 to put the blame for the deaths of two Georgia women in 2022 on the U.S. Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Amber Thurman and Candi Miller died after taking abortion medication left them with some fetal tissue remaining in their uteruses. Doctors worried about running afoul of Georgia’s abortion ban delayed caring for Thurman for 20 hours, while Miller sought to treat herself rather than see a doctor because of the same concerns.

While Harris has called for codifying the Roe v. Wade ruling into federal law, former President Donald Trump – the Republican nominee – has supported leaving the abortion issue to the states.