On Thursday, April 9, 2026, the Nevada Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a challenge by Planned Parenthood Mar Monte to a decades-old law that would require parents be notified before a minor can obtain an abortion. The case centers on Senate Bill 510, a 1985 statute that includes a judicial bypass for young people who say notifying a parent would endanger them. After about an hour of questioning, the court took the case under submission and offered no immediate ruling.
The Nevada Judiciary's oral-argument calendar lists the matter as Docket No. 91394, scheduled as a full-court hearing in Las Vegas and described as an appeal from a lower court's denial of a preliminary injunction against S.B. 510, according to the Nevada Judiciary. The docket flags several issues the justices will decide, including standing, ripeness and whether the statute's bypass process is unconstitutionally vague.
What attorneys told the court
Planned Parenthood’s lawyer told justices the 1985 law is vague and "lacks guardrails," leaving clinicians uncertain how to comply and at risk of criminal exposure. The Nevada Attorney General’s Office, represented in court by Heidi Stern, countered that the AG would not prosecute providers and urged the court to apply ordinary meanings to the statute; she acknowledged that county district attorneys retain independent prosecutorial discretion. Those exchanges and the justices’ probing questions were reported by Courthouse News.
How the law would work
Under S.B. 510, physicians generally must notify a parent or guardian before performing an abortion on an unemancipated person under 18 unless the procedure is immediately necessary to preserve life or health. Otherwise, a minor may seek a judicial bypass that the statute requires a judge to decide within three days. A default "pocket approval" can occur if a judge does not rule in time, and the law also sets out a certified-mail notice requirement and misdemeanor penalties for noncompliance. The Nevada Judiciary’s synopsis details those timelines, according to the Nevada Judiciary. A federal order issued March 31, 2025, which vacated a longstanding injunction that had been in place since 1991, describes how the 1985 law was positioned to take effect, as reflected in the federal court record in that case, according to the federal order.
What’s next
The court made no ruling at argument and took the matter under submission, meaning the justices will issue a written opinion at a later date. That outcome will shape whether providers must follow S.B. 510’s reporting rules across counties or whether the statute remains unenforced. Planned Parenthood first sued to block enforcement last summer, when it sued to block enforcement of the decades-old parental-notification law, and the exchanges at oral argument were chronicled by Courthouse News. Abortion remains legal in Nevada through 24 weeks, and a 2024 ballot question to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution must clear a second voter approval in 2026, according to AP News.
Legal implications
The central legal question is whether a 1991 declaration that struck down S.B. 510 left the statute void or whether the federal court’s March 31, 2025 vacatur of the earlier injunction effectively revived its enforceability, a tension the federal order explicitly discussed. The March 31, 2025 order and the briefing in the federal record will be pivotal to the Nevada Supreme Court’s eventual opinion as the parties press competing views on standing, vagueness and due process, according to the federal order.
