Idaho’s attorney general filed an appeal on Thursday after a judge overturned part of the state’s prohibitions on abortion, and requested an emergency motion to stay the injunction to enforce one of the state’s pro-life laws during the appeal proceedings.
“A federal judge has replaced Idaho’s law with his own abortion standard, broad enough to treat even the ordinary risks of a C-section as justification for an abortion,” said Attorney General Raul Labrador in an August 20 statement published on the attorney general’s website.
Labrador continued: “He did so at the request of a doctor who admitted under oath he never bothered to learn what Idaho law permits, yet sent expectant mothers out of state when he could have cared for them here immediately.”
Idaho has some of the strictest abortion laws in the United States. Under the terms of the state’s “Defense of Life Act” and “Fetal Heartbeat Act”, abortion is prohibited except in cases of rape, incest or where the physical health of the mother is at risk. Doctors who perform illegal abortions face up to five years in prison.
Judge B Lynn Winmill ruled on August 13 that these laws violate the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to all who are born on US soil and also guarantees due process and equal protection under the law.
Winmill did not rule that the entirety of the laws were unenforceable, rather, only in cases where a mother seeks an abortion and threatens to harm herself.
This, said Labrador, is beyond the scope of the judiciary.
The 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “made clear that abortion policy belongs to the people and their elected state representatives, not the judiciary”, said Labrador, adding: “We have appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and we will fight until this ruling is reversed and Idaho’s law is restored.”
Last week’s ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by a physician who admitted he had never read the state’s Supreme Court rulings on the state’s abortion law nor had he received any training about what was and was not allowed, said Thursday’s statement.
This led the doctor to “fly a patient to Utah for care he could have, and should have, legally provided in Idaho”.
“Idaho’s law already allows doctors, exercising their good faith medical judgment, to perform an abortion to save a mother’s life, without waiting until death is imminent, and without needing to be certain that the mother would die without the abortion. The Idaho Supreme Court settled that standard in 2023,” said the Attorney General’s office, adding that the state’s pregnancy-related mortality rate has dropped from 18.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2018 to 4.29 in 2024.
