Little Rock Family Planning Services, which last week was ordered by the state to stop providing surgical abortions during the coronavirus pandemic, filed a motion Monday morning in an ongoing federal lawsuit to challenge the ban.

The motion asserts that the state’s enforcement of the Arkansas Department of Health’s April 3 directive on elective procedures to ban all surgical abortions except when immediately necessary to protect the life or health of the mother is unconstitutional.

The motion, and a related request for emergency relief from the ban, are being sought on an “expedited basis.”

The existing lawsuit that the abortion provider wants to join in, in the interests of judicial economy, challenges three state laws that were declared unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker last year, a decision that is on appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.

They are an 18-week ban on abortion, a ban prohibiting abortion if there is a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome and a requirement that abortion doctors be board-certified or board-eligible obstetricians-gynecologists. The clinic alleges that the three laws impermissibly obstruct women’s access to abortion.

The new challenge alleges that Gov. Asa Hutchinson and the Health Department are using the covid-19 health crisis “as a pretext for barring women from accessing reproductive health care” in Arkansas.