Idaho AG Hails Pro-Life Win

Idaho has won a major pro-life victory in state court.

Judge Jason Scott of Idaho’s 4th Judicial District Court on Friday held that there was no expansive right to an abortion under the state’s constitution while acknowledging the state’s two exemptions to the general ban on the procedure.

The ruling follows a separate win last month for the state, when President Donald Trump’s Justice Department dropped a Biden-era lawsuit that was attempting to interpret federal law to prevail over Idaho’s Defense of Life Act. 

Reacting to the new judicial decision, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador said, “While we still disagree with portions of the ruling, it confirms what my office has argued in courts from Boise to Washington, D. C.—that Idaho’s abortion laws are constitutional and protect both unborn children and their mothers.” 

The case, Adkins v. State of Idaho, was brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of four women, two doctors, and the Idaho Academy of Family Physicians. The pro-abortion group sued the state of Idaho to expand what would qualify as an exemption under Idaho’s abortion ban. Idaho is one of several states that had strict abortion bans take effect after 1973’s Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022. 

There are two exceptions to Idaho’s ban. The first is if “[t]he physician determined, in his good faith medical judgment and based on the facts known to [him] at the time, that the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” The action must not rely on the justification that the woman would have harmed herself if she did not receive an abortion, and the manner of the abortion “provided the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive, unless … termination of the pregnancy in that manner would have posed a greater risk of the death of the pregnant woman.”

Idaho has a separate exemption for first-trimester abortions in the case of rape or incest. The state also has a fetal heartbeat law, the legal standing of which is superseded by the state’s general abortion ban law. 

The district judge rejected the plaintiffs’ reasoning that one of the exemptions to the ban would encompass health problems that did not rise to the status of life-threatening.

“Further, the legislature’s “prevent the death” phrasing evinces no concern for maternal-health complications not dire enough to pose a death risk, yet Plaintiffs’ proposed interpretation seemingly would allow physicians to perform abortion in response to maternal-health complications not so dire, contrary to the legislature’s intent,” Scott wrote in his ruling. 

The judge concluded that an abortion could be performed if the patient “faces non-negligible risk of dying sooner without an abortion (even if her death is neither imminent nor assured)” with the two caveats that the risk of dying was not due to self-harm and that the pregnancy “is the one that, without risk increasing the risk (sic) of her death, best facilitates the unborn child’s survival outside the uterus, if feasible.”

“Idaho law has never required doctors to wait until a woman’s death is certain or imminent before performing an abortion,” Idaho’s attorney general noted. 

In a statement to the press, the Attorney General’s Office said it “remains committed to defending Idaho’s life-affirming laws with clarity and compassion—and will continue working to ensure they are fully understood, properly applied, and upheld in every forum where they are challenged.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights, while lamenting that the ruling was not all that it sought, claimed a small win, saying in a statement, “The ban previously allowed for abortions only when necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant patient. Today’s ruling broadens that, allowing patients to access abortion care if they have a health condition or pregnancy complication that creates some risk that the patient may die at some point if they do not receive an abortion.”

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