Idaho Supreme Court rules pro-life laws can take effect despite lawsuits

After multiple lawsuits attempting to keep protections for preborn children from taking effect, the Idaho Supreme Court has ruled in the state’s favor while the cases make their way through the courts. Therefore, multiple protections, including a heartbeat law modeled after the Texas Heartbeat Act and a trigger law, will take effect on August 25.

The ruling was released late Friday, denying requests from Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, and abortionist Caitlin Gustafson to block the laws until the cases were settled.

Idaho was one of several states to have a trigger law in place when Roe v. Wade was overturned. The law was written to take effect 30 days after the formal judgment overturning Roe was issued, which is August 25. Planned Parenthood sued in June to block that law.

Another law, the heartbeat law, protects preborn children from abortion starting at six weeks, which is generally when a preborn child’s heartbeat can be detected (though the heart begins to beat by 22 days post-fertilization). That legislation was written so the law would be triggered 30 days after an appellate court upholds a similar law in another state, which recently took place in Georgia.

Finally, the third law allows relatives of a preborn child to sue abortionists for committing an abortion, though rapists are blocked from being allowed to sue.

The Supreme Court merged the three lawsuits into one, and ruled that Planned Parenthood and Gustafson failed to show that allowing the laws to take effect would cause “irreparable harm.”

READ: Biden DOJ sues Idaho, claims pro-life laws will prevent women from receiving ‘medical care’

“What petitioners are asking this Court to ultimately do is to declare a right to abortion under the Idaho Constitution when — on its face — there is none,” Justice Robin Brody wrote for the majority. “In fact, before Roe announced a federal constitutional right to abortion in 1973, abortion had been a longstanding criminal offense in Idaho.”

All of the laws include exceptions for medical emergencies; Gustafson and Planned Parenthood argued that these exceptions were too vague. Yet there are lifesaving options for a child’s mother in serious situations that do not necessitate intentionally killing a preborn child. Treating serious health conditions and/or things like ectopic pregnancy are not induced abortions — something Planned Parenthood itself knows, despite its attempts to mask that reality from the public in recent weeks.

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In a statement, Planned Parenthood attempted to spin the legal development as the next step towards a dystopian hellscape, rather than an environment in which vulnerable human beings are protected from violence and death.

“Tonight, the people of Idaho saw their bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom taken away,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “The court’s decision today is horrific and cruel. But this isn’t the end of the fight, and it isn’t our last day in court. No one should see their lives used as pawns by their elected officials or judicial system. Idahoans need and deserve more, and we will continue to fight until this wrong is made right.”

Planned Parenthood speaks often of cruelty and how abortion affects lives, but there is no concern for the cruelty visited upon preborn children, or how abortion takes thousands of innocent lives every single day. Idahoans do need and deserve more — more than the deaths of children by abortion.

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