Jeffrey Harris, partner in Consovoy McCarthy Park in Arlington, Virginia (Courtesy photo)

The state of Georgia has already paid more than $300,000 to the Washington, D.C.-based law firm hired to defend its statutory ban on abortion, according to Attorney General Chris Carr.

The state's outside counsel for the abortion battle is Consovoy McCarthy in Washington. The Consovoy team includes: Jeffrey M. Harris, Patrick Strawbridge and Steven Begakis. Harris argued for the state in the latest federal court hearing.

"The total cost for the state on this matter currently is $307,187.80 for attorney's fees and related expenses," Carr's office said Tuesday in response to an open records act inquiry.

And the case appears likely to continue. Carr said he plans to appeal a federal judge's ruling Monday that the law is unconstitutional. That could mean further fighting at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge precedent legalizing abortion, beginning with the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

Attorneys challenging the law plan to ask the court to order the state to pay their legal fees as well.

"I can't predict what that will be," said lead plaintiffs counsel, ACLU Georgia Legal Director Sean J. Young. "But the state could be on the hook for it."

Young noted the state of Alabama has already paid $2 million for the ACLU's legal costs for defeating other abortion bans. That would include the $1.7 million Alabama paid to the ACLU after federal courts struck down a 2013 law that required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at hospitals near the clinics where they were working. Plus, in 2019, a federal court ordered Alabama to pay $675,964 for the other side's legal fees after the state lost on an attempt to ban a common second-trimester abortion procedure.

That doesn't include the latest and most extreme Alabama abortion law: a total ban passed last year. District Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama has already struck down that law and is now considering ordering the state to pay legal fees in that case. The judge has asked for additional briefing on the amount of the fees and is planning a hearing.

Young expressed the hope that the fight could be over for Georgia.

"It's up to the state," he said.

But no chance it's over, according to Gov. Brian Kemp.

"We will appeal the Court's decision," Kemp said after the ruling in a statement posted on Twitter. "Georgia values life, and we will keep fighting for the rights of the unborn."

District Judge Steve Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Monday granted summary judgment to SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and other groups challenging the law that the Georgia General Assembly passed and Kemp signed in 2019.

The judge also denied the state's motion for summary judgment and enjoined the state and all defendants from enforcing the law created by House Bill 481. The law bans abortion as soon as a health professional can detect fetal cardiac activity—which could be as early as six weeks into pregnancy—with limited exceptions for rape reported to police or fatal medical conditions.

Jones ruled that SisterSong and other civil rights and advocacy groups "have established that H.B. 481 is unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it prohibits abortions at a pre-viability point in pregnancy."

Viability is the standard first set in Roe v. Wade and other rulings on a woman's right to make decisions regarding abortion. Until now, abortion restrictions upheld by the courts have been based on whether a fetus could survive outside a uterus. The viable gestational age has moved to earlier in pregnancy in recent years with advances in medical care, but both sides of the debate put it well beyond 20 weeks. Georgia already had a 20-week abortion ban, signed into law by Gov. Nathan Deal in 2012.

With the federal judge's ruling Monday permanently enjoining the state from enforcing the new approximately six-week ban, Georgia's law continues as it was before 2019 bill passed—with abortion legal up until 20 weeks.