Since 2021, Alaskans have had more options to seek abortion care — an important issue in a state that’s as sprawling and sparse as Alaska — but a case before the Alaska Supreme Court could change that.
Justices heard oral arguments on Wednesday in the state of Alaska’s appeal of a 2019 case that challenged a decades-old law that allowed only licensed doctors to perform an abortion in the state. The case was brought by Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, which argued that the law violated Alaskans’ right to privacy, which has long been established to protect the right to an abortion.
Under a November 2021 Superior Court injunction, the strict requirement was lifted, allowing qualified advanced nurse practitioners — including nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and certified nurse midwives — to perform the procedure. Since then, the state has been working through the appeals system to restore the law.
State attorney Laura Wolff argued that the doctor-only abortion law doesn’t violate the state’s privacy clause and right to an abortion because it only harmed a handful of people whose pregnancies developed beyond the point where an abortion is an option.
“What we look at when you are going to craft a remedy, if that’s what you’re going to do, is you look at the the breadth of the law and that the percentage of people that you know were substantially impacted, and if it’s a very small number, if it’s only on occasion, you don’t find a law unconstitutional,” she argued, noting that only two women were identified as not getting abortions because of the law.
She argued that the requirement to have abortions provided only by doctors wasn’t a significant impediment to people’s rights, but merely an inconvenience that doesn’t rise to the level of unconstitutionality. She also blamed Planned Parenthood, the state’s only abortion provider, for not having more doctors on staff.
“The state did not limit appointments to two days a week. That’s a choice Planned Parenthood made,” she said, comparing it to if the state limited marriage licenses to two days a week and whether that would be unconstitutional. “If it wasn’t a significant enough burden for Planned Parenthood to use volunteer doctors, it’s not a significant enough burden to apply strict scrutiny.”
Justice Dario Borgehsan noted that there’s a significant difference between marriages and an abortion, noting that abortions have a critical time element to them that marriages simply don’t have, which should be taken into consideration.
“Some women did time out of abortion windows,” he said. “Planned Parenthood makes a lot of efforts so that that doesn’t happen, but it still happens. So how do we, how do we kind of make sense of that?”
Wolff replied that she believed those claims weren’t actually supported by the evidence, a point that he justices didn’t seem to buy. Several justices noted that the Superior Court had definitely heard testimony that patients were ultimately unable to get an abortion because of the travel, timing restrictions and staffing limitations.
Other justices also raised issues with Wolff’s arguments, noting that Alaska’s vast geography and low population make it easier for laws like this to be an undue burden on people’s rights to make decisions about their health care.
On the other side of the case, Attorney Camila Vega, arguing for Planned Parenthood, said that the time since the law was put on hold has proven it was an unfair and arbitrary barrier to health care. Where abortion care was once only available a few days a month when a traveling doctor was available, requiring patients to not just travel but to stay for a week or more, it’s now available whenever the offices are open.
“The very fact that abortion is now available every single day that the health centers are open means that for people who are traveling to those health centers in Anchorage and Fairbanks, who may face travel delays, who may face inclement weather, who may have child care or other caregiving obligations and may just not be able to make it,” she said. “It means that for those patients, access is absolutely increased.”
She also took issue with Wolff’s argument that the law should be reinstated because it only harmed a few people.
“This court has never before required evidence about a threshold number of individual patients to strike down a law, and we would urge the court not to do so,” she said. “Here, the evidence below shows that since the injunction in this case, patients have been better able to access medication and aspiration abortion. They’ve been doing so for the last four years.”
The Alaska Supreme Court is expected to issue a written ruling on the law in the following months, but until then, abortion access will continue as it has been since 2021.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
