Anti-abortion groups have been trying to re-impose restrictions on abortion rights for 40 years, but the Legislature and governor of North Dakota have taken this attack on women’s reproductive health and freedom to a shocking new low by passing a bill that they must know perfectly well is unconstitutional by any reading of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and others since.

Under those rulings, full abortion bans are allowable only after fetal viability, which the medical community generally considers to be around 24 weeks into pregnancy. But North Dakota joins a growing list of states trying to set that limit earlier, including Arkansas and its unconstitutional ban after 12 weeks, enacted just three weeks ago.

North Dakota’s Republican governor, Jack Dalrymple, signed extreme laws that went even further, centering on a brazenly unconstitutional ban on nearly all abortions once a fetal heartbeat is “detectable.” That could be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, when some women do not even know they are pregnant, and requires testing with a transvaginal ultrasound.

The six-weeks ban stands little chance of surviving a court challenge. But bad ideas spread fast in this realm, and these kinds of actions show the rising influence of a formerly fringe element of the anti-abortion movement that is dissatisfied with its side’s considerable progress in incrementally curbing abortions. It is anxious to speed a case to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.