Anti-choice Republican Chris Carr won the Georgia attorney general race after Democratic challenger state Sen. Jen Jordan conceded on Wednesday.
The race was close, with abortion rights often taking center stage on the campaign trail. Carr, the incumbent, is an outspoken abortion opponent who has said he will stand firm in his “commitment to preserving the rights of the unborn.”
Jordan conceded in a Wednesday morning statement.
“It has been my greatest honor to be Georgia’s Democratic nominee for Attorney General,” she said. “Although this chapter has come to an end, the fight for a safer, more equitable Georgia continues.”
“My decision to run for Attorney General was never about me, but about serving and protecting the people of this state,” Jordan continued. “It was about every woman who has suffered the loss of a child. It was about my 13-year-old daughter, and every little girl across Georgia who deserves to have the same rights as I have had my entire life. It was about keeping our communities safe, and ensuring our young people have the opportunity to grow old instead of falling victim to senseless acts of gun violence.”
At the center of the race was the state’s extreme six-week abortion ban, House Bill 481. Carr initially defended H.B. 481 in 2019 when it first passed through the state legislature and Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed it into law. The law was deemed unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade, but the six-week ban went into effect when those federal abortion protections fell this summer. Carr defended the extreme law in 2019 and worked diligently to enact it just a month after the Supreme Court’s decision to repeal Roe.
Carr criticized Jordan several times before the election because the state senator said she would challenge the extreme abortion ban in court. “The attorney general cannot sue the state of Georgia – it defends the state of Georgia,” Carr said during an October debate.
In addition to banning abortion around six weeks, Georgia’s law redefines a “natural person” as “any human being including an unborn child” – effectively defining any fetus or embryo past the six-week point as a person.
The termination, or suspected termination, of a pregnancy after the six-week point could be considered murder under Georgia’s law. And although there is an exception for miscarriage in H.B. 481, abortion and miscarriage are medically indistinguishable. This means the law empowers officials to scrutinize, surveil and criminalize women seeking abortion care and women with wanted pregnancies.
Carr has argued that the law is not intended to criminalize pregnant women seeking abortions or those with wanted pregnancies.
“There is no mechanism under state law to prosecute women for having an abortion, a miscarriage, or an ectopic pregnancy,” a spokesperson for Carr told HuffPost in October. “Georgia’s current criminal abortion code, which has been in effect for decades, makes clear that a pregnant woman cannot be prosecuted for obtaining an abortion, and the LIFE Act [H.B. 481] makes no change to that.”
For her part, Jordan continually railed against Carr and other Republicans in the state pushing extreme abortion restrictions. She criticized Carr for not being clear about how H.B. 481 would scrutinize and criminalize people with the capacity for pregnancy in Georgia.
“If a woman were to go to another state to seek abortion care, she could still be prosecuted here for conspiracy to commit murder or murder,” Jordan told HuffPost in October. “Medication abortions, in terms of how they present, look exactly like naturally occurring miscarriages, meaning women are going to be investigated for miscarriages.”
Jordan was an outspoken advocate for abortion rights long before she challenged Carr. She went viral in 2019 after discussing her seven miscarriages and one stillbirth during a floor speech against H.B. 481.
“A pregnant woman who suffers a miscarriage could be subjected to criminal investigation, indictment, prosecution — long before a jury is asked to determine whether she intentionally did anything to cause the loss,” Jordan said in her floor speech. “My experience wasn’t about abortion, but it is what’s at stake here. It’s about the fundamental right to privacy of women.”