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.
One reply on “AG Labrador Appeals Ruling That Would Let Doctors Override Idaho’s Pro-Life Law”
The Supreme Court erred greatly when the justices failed to apply the entire U.S. Constitution to the question of states’ rights to legalize abortion. While the word “abortion” is not in the Constitution, language protecting a person’s right to life is in the 14th amendment. Section 1 says, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
When Roe v. Wade was decided, we had less scientific information about gestation in the womb than at present. Clearly today we know that life begins at conception and the unborn child’s heart is beating before the mother even knows she is with child.
Yet thousands of years ago God told us that the unborn child is a person. Psalm 139:14-16 describes how God made each of us and knows all of our days before one of them even came to be. Luke 1:13 tells us John the Baptist’s father was told by an angel to give his son the name John. Luke 1:31 says Mary is told by an angel to give her son (the “Son of the Most High”) the name Jesus. And in Matthew 1: 20-21 Joseph is told in a dream “to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Despite the clear message of God’s Holy Word, some justices of the Supreme Court justices failed to acknowledge the truth that every unborn child is a person at an early stage of development and worthy of “equal protection of the laws.”
Does due process of law allow a person to be declined nourishment until he dies? (The abortion pill does this.) Does due process of law allow a person to be dismembered until he dies? (Suction abortion does this.) Is it lawful for a doctor to take an oath to “do no harm” and then refer a patient for or otherwise enable an abortion? (These doctors are clearly not advocates for the child.) Are the unborn children facing these actions given any advocates in the legal system?
It is time for the state attorneys general to be advocates for the unborn children who are still being murdered by the Supreme Court’s gross failure to apply the 14th amendment to the most defenseless persons in each state. NO state has the right to legalize abortion.