The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday affirmed the state’s law banning gender-affirming care for minors and abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, ruling the two issues were legally allowed to be combined.
The abortion ban was added as an amendment to Legislative Bill 574, which would restrict access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender young people, in the final days of Nebraska’s legislative session last year.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), challenged the law as a violation of a constitutional amendment requiring bills to stick to a single subject.
But the state’s highest court said even though abortion and gender-affirming care are “distinct types of medical care,” the law itself broadly encompasses the “regulation of permissible medical care.”
In a scathing partial dissent, Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman said she did not believe abortion and gender-affirming care comprise “one subject,” and she said the majority gave deference to the Legislature “at the expense of the Constitution.”
“Unrelated provisions that happen to do similar things at some level of generality do not dispel the criticism that the bill contains more than one subject,” Miller-Lerman wrote, adding it is not the role of the court “to scour the bill in hopes of finding one subject that could conceivably explain inclusion of very different acts in one bill.”
