In May, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (R) signed a stringent 20-week abortion ban with no exception in cases of rape or incest. That law was scheduled to go into effect at the beginning of the new year — but thanks to a last-minute court ruling in the final days of 2012, women and doctors have been spared the harsh abortion restriction.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit to block the “fetal pain” law from taking effect, claiming that both doctors and women would suffer under the unnecessary restriction. Proponents of banning abortions after 20 weeks of gestation rely on the widely-disputed claim that fetuses can feel pain after that point, but the science doesn’t back them up. In reality, Georgia’s HB 954 is focused on preventing women from making their own decisions about when to terminate a pregnancy, as well as criminally prosecute the doctors who choose to provide their patients with the health care they need after the arbitrary cut-off. After hearing the ACLU’s arguments, Georgia Judge Doris Downs issued a temporary injunction to right before the Christmas holiday to block the law from taking effect this week.

Nevertheless, several other states — Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Carolina — have enacted 20-week abortion bans, and Texas may consider one in the new legislative session.

But Georgia isn’t the only state to run into legal roadblocks as it attempts to scale back women’s access to abortion. The ACLU also won a temporary injunction against Arizona’s stringent ban — considered the worst restriction in the nation, since it redefines the gestational period to outlaw abortions even before 20 weeks of pregnancy — while it is considered in court. Depending on the courts’ decisions in Georgia and Arizona, the so-called “fetal pain” laws in other states could also be at risk.

2012 was a banner year for new abortion restrictions, as 19 states passed 42 different provisions to restrict women’s access to reproductive health services. Imposing limits on later term abortions was one of the most popular methods that anti-choice lawmakers used to threaten abortion rights last year.

Three doctors in Georgia are seeking to block their state’s restrictive abortion ban, which outlaws the procedure after 20 weeks of gestation except in very narrow cases of medical emergency.

Representing the doctors in an Atlanta court on Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged that — in addition to preventing women from choosing when to terminate a pregnancy — the stringent law will force doctors to make an impossible choice because they could be criminally prosecuted for providing their patients with the health care they need:

“It is unconstitutional on its face,” ACLU attorney Alexa Kolbi-Molinas told the judge. “It is undisputed that plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm.” [...]

“The act, which bans nearly all pre-viability abortions after 20 weeks post-fertilization, infringes on the fundamental right of a woman to decide whether and when to bear a child,” and breaches rights enshrined in Georgia’s constitution, the ACLU argued in a Nov. 30 complaint.

Georgia was the seventh state in the nation to enact a 20-week abortion ban. Such measures typically rely on the widely disputed claim that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks.

The ACLU has also taken legal action against a similar stringent 20-week abortion ban in Arizona, successfully blocking the measure from taking effect while a court considers the case against it. Arizona officials defended the restrictive legislation by claiming that medical issues that arise after 20 weeks of pregnancy are simply “the woman’s problem.”

Georgia’s harmful immigration law, modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070, requires anyone who is applying for or renewing a professional license in the state to provide documents to prove their citizenship or legal residency. But the massive amount of paperwork required to do this is creating a bureaucratic nightmare for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the state.

Instead of taking a matter of days, the process is leading to delays of weeks or months for health care workers to renew or apply for their professional licenses. As a result, about 600 nurses and 1,300 doctors have lost their ability to work in Georgia so far.

The Georgia secretary of state’s office — which processes license applications of nurses, pharmacists, and veterinarians — does not have enough staff to work through the cumbersome process to restore licenses for those medical professionals, partly because the office saw its budget cut by 40 percent at the same time as the immigration law went into effect. Georgia’s medical board is responsible for licensing other medical professionals in the state, such as doctors, physician assistants, and even acupuncturists, and is running into the same problem:

Director LaSharn Hughes says she sent 41,000 letters of notification out on a recent Thursday. “And by Monday, we’d burned up a fax machine,” Hughes said. “We didn’t have the staff. We didn’t have the equipment.”

Phones go unanswered. Paperwork piles up. And processing delays, coupled with confusion over the new rules, mean lots of expired licenses. [...]

Donald Palmisano Jr. executive director of the Medical Association of Georgia, says the law fixes a problem that never existed — at least not among doctors. “We’re not aware of any undocumented immigrants that are physicians,” Palmisano said.

Even D.A. King, a right-wing activist who helped write Georgia’s immigration law, said he thinks the provision goes too far. Earlier this year, a bill to fix portions of the extreme immigration measure failed in the legislature. “I am not only outraged, but sincerely disappointed and puzzled that our repair legislation was not allowed a vote,” King said. Meanwhile, state officials say the documents requirement has not uncovered any undocumented immigrants who applied for professional licenses.