The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio will allow a pre-viability abortion ban to take effect in Tennessee, according to a motion decided and filed on Wednesday. The lawsuit, Memphis Center for Reproductive Health ,et al. v. Herbert Slatery, et al., was first filed in August 2020, a month after the restrictive HB 2263 and SB 2196 bills were signed into law. Within minutes after the bills were signed, a District Court issued a temporary restraining order that prevented the laws from taking effect. That November, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel allowed only some of the law to take effect, including a “reasons ban” in which patients are unable to receive abortions based off of reasons related to sex, race, or prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome. This back-and-forth case continued seeing the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rule in favor of the state, as it did on Wednesday.

Both bills alarmed reproductive rights advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee, which was among a group of organizations that filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, Planned Parenthood Tennessee and North Mississippi, Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health, carafem, and two Tennessee abortion providers. ACLU of Tennessee Executive Director Hedy Weinberg said she was “disturbed” by Wednesday’s decision, given that it allows abortion bans “to take effect while the case continues, forcing some Tennesseans to remain pregnant.”

“This law is motivated purely by anti-abortion politics—it does nothing to ensure that people living with disabilities and their families have access to health care and other services they may need, nor does it address gender or racial discrimination or their root causes,” Weinberg said.

According to a summary of the bills, the legislation “creates the Class C felony of performing or inducing, or attempting to perform or induce, an abortion upon a pregnant woman whose unborn child has a fetal heartbeat; creates other criminal offenses related to the performance of an abortion; requires that certain information regarding reversing chemical abortions be provided; revises and enacts other abortion-related provisions.”

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has consistently touted his anti-abortion record, most recently in a State of the State speech in which he said that his “office has proposed and supported some of the soundest pro-life legislation in the country.” Just two months before a complaint was initially filed over HB 2263 and SB 2196, Lee issued an executive order barring nonemergency procedures due to the pandemic that included surgical abortions. According to NARAL, Tennessee is considered a state with severely restricted abortion access as it is. Thanks to Lee and his ilk, an estimated 63% of Tennessee women live in counties with no abortion providers—and that percentage is only growing. Advocates are so concerned that they are reportedly considering sending patients three hours away to Illinois in order for them to receive the necessary reproductive care they need.

The ACLU of Tennessee is committed to making sure this isn’t the final word on HB 2263 and SB 2196. “We will continue to fight for people’s ability to make their own decisions about pregnancy without political interference,” Weinberg said.