A judge in Georgia struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban on Monday, declaring the ban unconstitutional and blocking its enforcement.

In a 26-page opinion, Fulton County Chief Judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must be restored to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022.

Abortions are now legal in Georgia until around the 22nd week of pregnancy.

Many women, McBurney wrote, didn’t even know they were pregnant by six weeks.

“For these women, freedom of privacy means they alone can decide whether to act as human breeding grounds during the five months until viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not the job of a lawmaker, a judge, or a commander of The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies in this time when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb, nor can society could – or should – force it. “They are intended to serve as a human tissue bank or give up one kidney in favor of another.”

In a footnote, McBurney added: “There is an unpleasant and usually unspoken undertone of involuntary servitude circulating in this debate, symbolically illustrated in this case by the composition of the legal team.” Generally, it is men who support laws like the Life Act and defend, which results in requiring only women – and given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented in the trial, primarily poor women, which in Georgia means primarily black and brown women – to compulsory labor, that is, to carry a pregnancy to term at the behest of the Government.”

McBurney’s ruling comes weeks after ProPublica reported that two Georgia women died because they were unable to access legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned.