This morning, a full Fourth Circuit Court reconsidered a Virginia ban on certain late-term abortion procedures.
Last May, a three-judge panel ruled the Virginia law, which banned the most common second-term abortion procedure, unconstitutional. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the court found that "it was substantially broader than the federal law, exposing physicians to the risk of criminal prosecution and imprisonment for using the safest and most common method of second-trimester abortion." The Supreme Court had ordered the Fourth Circuit to re-evaluate the constitutionality of the Virginia ban, after it upheld a the Federal Abortion Ban in Gonzales v. Carhart. But the Virginia attorney general's office asked the full court to rehear the case.
