BOISE, Idaho — A federal judge has blocked Idaho from prosecuting doctors who perform abortions when necessary to protect a pregnant woman’s health or prevent her from harming herself, delivering a significant but limited setback to one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws.
U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled that portions of Idaho’s Defense of Life Act and Fetal Heartbeat Act violate the due process and equal protection guarantees of the 14th Amendment when they prevent doctors from providing abortions to women facing serious health risks.
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador said the state will appeal.
The ruling doesn’t invalidate Idaho’s broader abortion restrictions. Instead, it expands the circumstances in which doctors can legally perform abortions beyond the state’s existing exception for procedures necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman.
Winmill concluded that the Constitution protects access to an abortion in certain circumstances when continuing a pregnancy poses serious risks to a woman’s physical or mental health, including conditions that create a significant risk of self-harm or suicide.
“A pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim,” Winmill wrote.
The lawsuit was brought by Dr. Stacy Seyb, a Boise maternal-fetal medicine specialist who treats high-risk pregnancies. Seyb argued that Idaho’s laws prevented him from providing medically necessary abortions to some patients without exposing himself to potential criminal prosecution and professional sanctions.
Idaho law generally prohibits abortion with narrow exceptions, including procedures necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman and certain cases involving rape or incest that have been reported to law enforcement. Physicians who violate the state’s restrictions can face prison time and loss of their medical licenses.
Winmill stressed that his decision wasn’t based on reviving the broad constitutional abortion right previously recognized under Roe v. Wade, which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned.
Instead, the case centered on how far a state may go in requiring a woman to endure serious medical harm to continue a pregnancy. Winmill concluded that the 14th Amendment places limits on that power.
The judge didn’t accept all of Seyb’s arguments. He upheld Idaho’s restrictions as applied to abortions sought because a fetus has a severe or life-limiting condition, unless continuing the pregnancy also poses a sufficiently serious threat to the mother’s health.
Labrador criticized the decision, saying Winmill had “manufactured a new constitutional right to abortion” and indicating the state would challenge the ruling on appeal.
The decision adds another chapter to litigation over Idaho’s abortion laws following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which returned broad authority over abortion policy to the states.
It leaves much of Idaho’s abortion law intact while establishing a potentially significant constitutional boundary on how the state’s restrictions may be applied when a pregnancy threatens a woman’s health.
The case is expected to move next to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.