After an Idaho district court became the first federal court in the nation to “find” a new federal constitutional right to abortion post-Dobbs, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, serving alongside Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit Wednesday to allow the state to protect the lives of unborn children and women.
Just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion to the people and their elected representatives, the district court ruled that Idaho can’t enforce its democratically enacted laws to protect unborn babies and their mothers. Attorneys explain that since the pro-life laws have been in effect, Idaho’s maternal mortality rate has plummeted.
But the district court’s ruling blows a hole in Idaho’s protection for life by allowing abortion doctors to decide—in their personal judgment—what maternal health risks are sufficient to terminate a baby. The district court even intimated that risk of a C-section would justify an abortion. The ruling also permits essentially any professed concerns about mental health issues to allow for abortion, despite abortion not treating the cause of any mental health problem.
“States have the strongest possible interest in protecting the most fundamental of our human rights—the right to life. Nothing in the federal Constitution grants a right to take innocent, unborn life,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “We’re urging the court to respect Idahoans’ desire to protect life, which Attorney General Labrador has fought so courageously to defend.”
“Idaho’s Defense of Life Act protects both mothers and their unborn children,” Labrador added. “The U.S. Supreme Court was clear in Dobbs that there is no constitutional right to abortion and that states have full authority to protect unborn life. That authority rests with the people of Idaho through their elected representatives. We will defend that law as far as needed.”
In the case, Seyb v. Labrador, the attorneys filed an emergency motion for a stay pending appeal with the 9th Circuit, explaining that, “Just four years after” the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the district court “has become the first to re-constitutionalize abortion. Its injunctions defy Dobbs, create expansive rights based on a doctor’s subjective assessment of risk, and contradict the vast history of state prohibitions on ‘therapeutic’ abortions.”
