A hospital committee and three physicians will still have to approve before Georgia women can get abortions, even though a three-judge federal court has knocked out the limiting reasons for the operation.

The court on July 31 ruled unconstitutional that portion of the state law allowing abortions only when the mother’s or fetus’ health was endangered or when the mother had been forcibly raped.

However, it rejected the contention that a women has the right to “use her body as she wishes.”

“Unlike the decision to use contraceptive devices, the decision to abort a pregnancy affects other interests than those of the woman alone, or even husband and wife alone,” the court said.

The state has “a legitimate area of control short of an invasion of the personal right of initial decision” and the hospital committee does not go beyond this, it added.

“Once conception takes place and an embryo forms,” the ruling said, “for better or worse the women carries a life form with the potential of independent human existence.”

“Without posting the existence of a new being with its own identity and federal constitutional rights, we hold that once the embryo has formed, the decision to abort its development cannot be considered a purely private one affecting only husband and wife, man and woman.” The judges also held that the state “has a clear right to circumscribe a decision made by a woman alone or by a woman and a single physician,” and has a legitimate interest in guarding against “abortion mills” being operated by unethical practitioners. The state also can require standards of safety and sanitation, they added.

The women will still have to have the concurrence of three physicians, including her own, and a hospital committee, but the committee will not be restricted to the three limiting reasons.

The court also struck the provision that allowed a district attorney or any relative to the second degree of consanguinity (grandparents, uncles and aunts) to intervene on behalf of fetus in a court suit to block an abortion.