Abortion rights advocates sued the Idaho government on Tuesday, claiming a state law that prohibits adults from helping minors get an abortion is unconstitutional.
Idaho has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, forcing patients to seek care in neighboring states such as Oregon and Washington, where the procedure is legal. But in April, Idaho lawmakers passed legislation requiring any person under 18 to get permission from a parent or guardian before traveling out of state to get an abortion. The controversial law marks the first major push since the fall of Roe v Wade in 2022 to explicitly block people from traveling across state lines to access abortion.
“It is a new level of government intrusion on what it means to be an American,” said Wendy Heipt, a lawyer at Legal Voice, an advocacy group representing the plaintiffs challenging the Idaho statute.
The new lawsuit said the Idaho statute violates multiple constitutional protections, including the right to free speech, due process, and the ability to travel between states. Under the law, anyone who helps a minor get an abortion could be sentenced to two or five years in prison, but adults are also prohibited from “recruiting” a pregnant minor, a term that reproductive justice advocates in the state said is confusing and vague.
“Does ‘recruit’ mean handing someone a brochure? Does that mean a conversation about options?” said Heipt. “It is incredibly hard for the average person to know what they can and can’t legally do under this law.”
Lourdes Matsumoto, the only individual plaintiff on the case, is an Idaho attorney who works with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, many of whom are minors.
Before the law’s passage in April, Matsumoto said she encountered cases where a child is impregnated through rape “roughly once per month”.
She still hears stories of young assault survivors on a near-daily basis, but Matsumoto said she has stopped hearing about cases involving pregnancy.
“It’s not that the problem has gone away, people are just more hesitant to reach out for help,” Matsumoto said. “The law empowers abusers, if you don’t have access to information, it is much, much harder to get out of a dangerous situation.”
There is particular confusion over what constitutes “recruiting” a minor in the context of the law.
“Nobody knows what is illegal, which puts everyone at risk,” Matsumoto said. “What if an Uber driver just picks somebody up and drives them to the border, are they liable?”
In March, the Idaho state senator Todd Lakey, a Republican who championed the law, conceded that the language is ambiguous.
“Recruiting, harboring and transporting, those are descriptive words, I guess the court would have to decide if the conduct constitutes one of those three things,” said Lakey, roughly one week before the language was signed into law by Idaho’s governor, Brad Little.
The plaintiffs suing Idaho said the law was hastily cobbled together by Lakey and his fellow conservative legislators under the assumption that the state court system would rule against abortion rights. Earlier this year, the Idaho supreme court upheld the state’s sweeping abortion ban, adding that the Idaho constitution does not protect access to the procedure.
But conservative judges, even those hostile to abortion rights, might be skeptical of the new Idaho law. When the US supreme court ruled that there is no federal right to abortion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion that people could still travel out of state to get an abortion, citing the constitutional right to interstate travel.
“We know travel bans are unpopular and maybe unconstitutional,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at University of California, Davis.
Ziegler said Idaho was “repackaging” the law as a kind of parental rights issue, not a travel ban.
“Idaho’s position is ‘this isn’t a ban on travel, the actions that are criminalized by this law are supposed to be taking place in Idaho,’” she said.
She said the law is designed to sidestep the constitutional boundary set by Justice Kavanaugh to instead focus on the preparations that an adult might make within Idaho. For example, helping a minor make an appointment at an abortion clinic in Washington or Oregon.
“Idaho is a testing ground for many conservative causes,” said Ziegler, pointing to the state’s first-in-the-nation law restricting transgender children’s ability to participate in sports.
If the court upholds the Idaho law, Ziegler warns that other conservative state legislatures might be emboldened to pass copycat laws. She also warned that Idaho’s focus on minors might be the “tip of the iceberg”.
“If you’re [in] the anti-abortion movement, you want this law upheld by the courts, but that isn’t the endgame,” she said. “You want to leverage that ruling to go after the rights of adults.”
The anti-trans legislation of today could foreshadow the future of abortion restrictions. For years, conservative lawmakers have restricted transgender minors’ access to healthcare. In April, Missouri became the first state to restrict adult patients’ access to gender-affirming care.
Ziegler said the ultimate goal of abortion opponents who support the Idaho law is to “stop everybody from traveling out of state for abortion”.
