Attorney General Raúl Torrez has asked the state supreme court to stay a lawsuit filed by the city of Eunice, which challenges the recently-passed House Bill 7 prohibiting local municipalities from restricting an individual's access to reproductive healthcare.
Eunice, a small city in the east of the state, is suing to overturn the new law, in the latest in an escalating battle over local ordinances restricting access to abortion, which remains legal in New Mexico.
Eunice is one of six local authorities in the state to pass an ordinance restricting access to abortion. Mayor Billy Hobbs told KUNM the ordinance cites a 19th century law that has been largely dormant for decades.
"Our ordinance clearly follows federal law," he said. "We feel like that's the way we should be going, is what the federal law says, and not make up our own rules and regulations on this abortion issue."
All the other local ordinances also cite the same law, known as the Comstock Act after an anti-vice campaigner.
The New Mexico Supreme Court is set to hear a case about whether the ordinances are legal, and in the meantime has stayed the implementation of most of them.
House Bill 7, passed earlier this year and due to come into force next month, is due to be part of the court's deliberations.
Last month, Billy Hobbs along with other officials and activists from Eunice and the surrounding area, went to Washington, DC, and, standing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, announced that the city was suing the governor and attorney general over the new state law.
Texan anti-abortion campaigner Mark Lee Dickson, who has been active in rallying support for the local ordinances, stood alongside him.
"It seems like these federal statutes are eventually going to end up with the Supreme Court of the United States anyway," Dickson told KUNM in an interview. "So we figured what better place to make this announcement than where it's all going to end up at in the end anyway?"
Now, the attorney general has asked the state supreme court to stay that lawsuit, until it has heard the upcoming case on the local ordinances.
Torrez said in a statement, "While local leaders in Eunice chose to announce their lawsuit from Washington D.C., this issue will be governed by state law, not some warped interpretation of an anti-vice federal statute from the 1870’s."
