BOISE — Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador has appealed a ruling from federal court issued last week that found Idaho’s abortion ban could not apply to cases when a pregnancy threatens the mother’s health or life.
Last week U.S. District Court of Idaho Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled Idaho’s “Defense of Life Act” to be unconstitutional as it bars abortions in cases where the mother’s health is at risk and cases where the mother’s life is at risk due to potential for suicide or self-harm. The state law passed in 2020 and became effective in 2022 following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
The suit was initially brought in 2024 by the Lawyering Project and Legal Voice on behalf of Dr. Stacy Seyb, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist with St. Luke’s Health System who has exclusively treated woman with high-risk pregnancies.
After Idaho’s abortion law went into effect, Seyb has said patients who would have previously been treated by him — such as patients with fetuses that have lethal conditions — have needed to be referred out of state.
Winmill’s siding with Seyb prompted a statement from Labrador declaring the ruling would be appealed immediately. A release from his office on Thursday said the case has now been appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking a reversal of the district court’s ruling.
As a result of Winmill’s ruling, the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney and the Idaho Attorney General have been enjoined from enforcing the state’s abortion ban when a physician determines, in good faith, that continuing a pregnancy brings a “non-negligible risk of serious and lasting harm to health of the pregnant woman,” as was previously reported by the Idaho Press.
In response to this portion of the decision, an emergency motion has been filed requesting the district court to stay its injunction to allow the continued enforcement of the Defense of Life Act as the appeals process continues.
The emergency motion asserts the injunction contradicts the Dobbs ruling and improperly blocks Idaho from enforcing its law against each doctor in the state. The latter is in violation of a 2025 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court finding federal courts cannot issue universal injunctions beyond a case’s plaintiffs, a release from Labrador’s office said.
“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,” Labrador said in a release from his office. “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.”
Reiterating the state’s argument set forward in district court, Idaho’s Office of the Attorney General has contended Idaho’s abortion law already allows doctors to perform an abortion to save a mother’s life, without waiting until death is imminent or requiring certainty that a mother would die without an abortion.
Winmill’s ruling, however, rejected the defendants’ position that Seyb “simply misunderstands Idaho’s abortion ban.” A separate decision involving Planned Parenthood Great Northwest found “objective certainty” of death in the absence of abortion was not needed to perform the procedure, meaning a “medical consensus” on the necessity of an abortion doesn’t need to exist.
A prosecutor could, however, use the “absence of a consensus” as evidence a physician violated Idaho’s law, putting them at risk of facing legal consequences, the ruling continued.
Winmill also found the Dobbs decision “explicitly addressed ‘elective abortions’” without analysis of abortions “performed out of medical necessity.” According to Winmill, this meant the heart of the case — whether there is a right to abortion under circumstances that will “permanently alter the woman’s life” — had not been resolved by the landmark ruling.
A contradictory argument was maintained by Labrador on Thursday.
“Dobbs made clear that abortion policy belongs to the people and their elected state representatives, not the judiciary,” Labrador said in the release. “We have appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and we will fight until this ruling is reversed and Idaho’s law is restored.”