On March 25, the court will hear oral argument in a case challenging the constitutionality of the state’s criminal abortion ban. The ban makes it a felony to perform an abortion at any stage of pregnancy with limited and unclear exceptions.

In Access Independent Health Services v. Wrigley, a group of reproductive health care providers argue that the ban violates the North Dakota Constitution for various reasons, including because it is an unconstitutional restriction on individuals’ personal and reproductive autonomy and therefore violates North Dakotans’ inalienable rights to life, liberty, safety and happiness.

An examination of North Dakota’s history makes clear that they’re right – the state’s Constitution is sweeping in its guarantees of freedom and protection of individual rights, including the right to reproductive autonomy – and the North Dakota Supreme Court should join the many other states that have concluded that their state constitutions protect a right to abortion.

North Dakota’s journey to statehood was a long one, throughout which the people of the Dakota Territory felt a kinship to the colonists in their fight for independence from Great Britain. Along with this kinship came a reverence for the Declaration of Independence and its guarantee of the inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Indeed, when drafting their own version of an inalienable rights clause, the Framers of the North Dakota Constitution looked to the Declaration for guidance.

But the Declaration served only as a starting point for the framers, who went on to adopt one of the most expansive inalienable rights clauses in effect at the time of drafting in 1889. When they presented the Constitution to the people of North Dakota, the very first clause of the document read: “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property and reputation; and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness.” By using language even more expansive than that in the Declaration, and making it the very first provision in the Constitution, the Constitution’s framers made clear that they wanted to enshrine in their founding charter a sweeping protection for individual rights.

This text and history will be a focal point for the North Dakota Supreme Court as it considers the parties’ arguments in this case. But the court will be guided by its prior cases, as well, and the North Dakota Supreme Court has interpreted the inalienable rights clause as a sweeping guarantee of personal freedom in nearly all components of life, including child rearing, the home, bodily autonomy, and health in all of its aspects. These precedents – particularly when considered alongside the historical backdrop of the North Dakota Constitution – make clear that the Inalienable Rights Clause protects the right to reproductive freedom.

Significantly, the idea that a sweeping and powerful Inalienable Rights Clause protects the right to abortion – and, indeed, does so beyond circumstances necessary to preserve a pregnant person’s life or health – is not novel. Other states have interpreted their inalienable or natural rights clauses, several of which are textually narrower than North Dakota’s, to protect the right to reproductive autonomy.

As the North Dakota Supreme Court considers this case, it will face fundamental questions that go to the heart of the North Dakota Constitution’s guarantee of personal freedom, and the Court’s answers to these questions will profoundly affect North Dakotans’ lives. Fortunately, the North Dakota Constitution provides the answer: the right to reproductive autonomy is a core component of the personal freedom and self-determination the Constitution guarantees, and the state criminal abortion ban violates that right.