Women's health provider Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday filed a lawsuit challenging Arkansas' ban on all abortions except in medical emergencies, one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the United States.

Arkansas' law, which Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson signed in March and which is due to go into effect in late summer, makes it a felony for doctors to provide abortions except in medical emergencies, with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

Like many other abortion restrictions passed in Republican-led states in recent years, the law is part of a conservative effort to prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that guarantees a woman’s right to abortion before a fetus is viable, at around 24-28 weeks.

The Supreme Court signaled it was open to possibly overturning that precedent last week, when it agreed to review Mississippi's bid to ban abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy.

"We are not going to stand by while Arkansas attempts to deny people their constitutional right to abortion care," Meagan Burrows, staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.