| BOISE, ID — Four years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that the U.S. Constitution says nothing about abortion and returned the thorny issue of how to regulate abortion back to the states, where it had rested until the Roe decision transferred that authority to the Courts. Following Dobbs, Idaho chose to protect the lives of unborn children in Idaho, while still allowing mothers to receive care when their own lives are at risk.
Last week, a federal district judge defied the U.S. Supreme Court and invented a new constitutional right to abortion based on a risk to health or threats of suicide. Attorney General Raúl Labrador has now filed a notice of appeal asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the ruling, and also filed an emergency motion asking the district court to stay its own injunction to allow Idaho’s Defense of Life Act to be enforced while the appeal proceeds.
The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by Dr. Stacy Seyb, a St. Luke’s physician who testified at trial that he never read the Idaho Supreme Court’s 2023 decision clarifying the state’s abortion law, had never received any training on the Defense of Life Act, and did not understand what the law allowed. That confusion led Seyb to fly a patient to Utah for care he could have, and should have, legally provided in Idaho. Unrebutted expert testimony at trial confirmed the delay increased her risk of complications. She arrived in Utah septic.
“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 Labrador. “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. Dobbs made clear that abortion policy belongs to the people and their elected state representatives, not the judiciary. We have appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and we will fight until this ruling is reversed and Idaho’s law is restored.”
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. Since Dobbs, Idaho’s pregnancy-related mortality rate has fallen from 18.7 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2018 to 4.29 in 2024, well below the national average.
Labrador’s emergency motion to stay the district court’s decision while the appeal is pending argues the district court’s ruling conflicts directly with Dobbs and improperly blocks Idaho from enforcing its law against every doctor in the state, not just Seyb. The Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA held that federal courts lack authority to issue universal injunctions that go beyond the plaintiffs in the case. |
