Boise, ID – Attorney General Raúl Labrador, along with 17 other Attorneys General, filed a brief in Preterm Cleveland v Ohio in the Supreme Court of Ohio, urging the court to reject the challenge to Ohio’s Heartbeat Act and uphold the will of the people.

“The State of Ohio passed a law protecting the unborn. The Dobbs decision sent the issue of abortion back to the States. If the people of Ohio wish to allow abortion, they have the democratic ability to make that opinion heard at the ballot box, as the founders intended. Activists should not be able to use the courts to thwart the will of the people. I urge the Ohio Supreme Court to uphold the Abortion Laws enacted by the people’s representatives,” Attorney General Labrador said.

In the brief, the Attorneys General note that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Dobbs “that Roe did not just get the U.S. Constitution wrong but also ‘distort[ed]’ ‘important’ legal rules” and “counted this decades-long distortion of basic legal rules as a strong reason to overrule Roe and set the law right.”

The Attorneys General continue, “But as abortion disputes have, after Dobbs, returned to the States, state courts have been urged to continue distorting the law to protect abortion.”

In the brief, the Attorneys General explain that granting abortion providers standing “departed from sound principles of standing, damaged the law, and hurt the Court. There is no good reason for this Court to engraft those problems onto Ohio law and to bring that harm to this State’s courts.”

The Attorneys General warn, “Nothing could be more damaging to a court than a jurisprudence that is at war with the demand to act based on neutral principles.”

The Attorneys General conclude that the Court should “hold that abortion providers lack third-party standing to challenge laws regulating or restricting abortions, like the Heartbeat Act challenged here.”

Attorney General Labrador joined Attorneys General from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia on this brief. Read the brief here.