CHARLESTON, West Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — Abortionists in West Virginia dropped their lawsuit against state regulations surrounding abortion on Monday, according to the nonprofit conservative legal group helping to defend the Republican-led state.
In an April 17 press release, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) noted that the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, an abortion facility, filed a lawsuit against the state over a pro-life law passed last year.
Attorneys with the ADF joined West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in defending the legislation, which has served to replace a more than 170-year-old pro-life law predating West Virginia’s statehood.
The Mountain State passed the measure late last year after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed nearly 50 years of federal abortion precedent in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, thereby eliminating the nationwide “right to abortion” and returning the right to regulate it back to the states.
Nearly all abortions are currently banned in West Virginia, with narrow exceptions for cases of rape, incest (if proof is provided, such as a notarized statement or a police report), medical emergencies, or babies deemed “nonmedically viable” (Live Action noted that “[i]nduced abortion is never necessary for any of these instances.”) Physicians may also treat ectopic pregnancies and remove babies who have already died in the womb, neither of which are equivalent to abortion in which a living baby is purposefully killed.
RELATED: West Virginia governor signs law supporting pro-life pregnancy centers
The ADF noted the abortionists sought to challenge two regulations regarding the rare abortions that would still be permitted under state law: “one that requires surgical abortions to be performed in a hospital, and another that requires an abortion to be performed by a licensed medical professional who has West Virginia hospital privileges.”
Attorneys with ADF and Patrick Morrisey told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, Charleston Division, that “even under Roe and Casey, an abortion provider had no constitutional right to perform an abortion using his or her preferred methods.”
On Monday, the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia said it wanted to drop its lawsuit against the state.
In a statement, ADF senior counsel and director of the ADF Center for Life Denise Harle said the case never should have been brought to begin with.
“West Virginia has a strong and compelling interest in protecting unborn life, and maternal health and safety. This baseless challenge to the state’s pro-life laws never should have been brought in the first place,” Harle said.
“Abortionists who file lawsuits of this sort frequently do so because they would rather make a profit off of vulnerable women rather than see them have the real health care and resources they need, but that effort here faced serious problems because West Virginia’s law is on solid legal ground,” she said.
The ADF noted that the lawsuit dropped Monday isn’t the only one in which attorneys are fighting to protect pro-life laws in the state against challenges brought by abortion proponents.
A separate case in which an abortion drug manufacturer is challenging the state’s pro-life laws is still ongoing.
Pharmaceutical company GenBioPro, Inc., which makes a generic version of the abortion drug mifepristone, filed a lawsuit against West Virginia in January, LifeSiteNews previously reported.
In the lawsuit, the drug company said the state’s laws curbing abortion, including chemical abortion, cut against Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regulations and damaged the corporation’s profit margin.
READ: Abortion pill maker sues West Virginia for alleged lost revenue from state’s restrictive new law
A slew of Republican states, including Texas, Florida, and Idaho, have signed onto an amicus brief supporting West Virginia’s pro-life law.
Meanwhile, the future of abortion drugs themselves hangs in the balance as the U.S. Supreme Court gets ready to consider whether the FDA improperly cut corners when it approved mifepristone, the first pill prescribed in the “gold standard” two-drug chemical abortion regimen.