The News & Observer‘s Under the Dome blog reports that N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office is defending the state’s informed-consent for abortion law. The AG filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by liberal advocacy groups seeking to have the law declared unconstitutional:

The state’s motion, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Greensboro, says the plaintiffs don’t have the legal standing to sue over the constitutional rights of abortion patients. Plaintiffs included the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, five doctors who perform abortions, and abortion clinics.

SNIP

The state’s motion to dismiss, filed by Thomas J. Ziko, a senior deputy attorney general, denies that the new law’s requirement for a narrated ultrasound amounts to government-mandated, ideological speech. It also argues that the lawsuit’s claim that the procedure amounts to an unreasonable intrusion upon women’s expectation of privacy oversimplifies and mischaracterizes what is a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The attorney general represents the state’s case in litigation challenging laws passed by the General Assembly. Until 2011, those laws were approved by a Democratic majority in the legislature. So it’s now interesting to see Cooper, a Democrat, having to go to bat for a Republican legislature.