In Seyb v. Members of the Idaho Board of Medicine, (D ID, August 13, 2026), decided three weeks ago, an Idaho federal district court in an 81-page opinion held that portions of Idaho's abortion law that impose a nearly total ban on abortions are unconstitutional. The court said in part:
... [This case] is not an attempt to relitigate Dobbs.... Rather, it is about a pregnant woman’s ability to seek necessary obstetric care under the most difficult and tragic circumstances. It is about whether the state may pick and choose which life-threatening conditions can justify an abortion.... [T]he Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment establish a narrow but fundamental right to abortion when a pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health....
... Idaho’s failure to permit a health-of-the-mother exception to the abortion ban represents an outlier position that contravenes basic principles of our constitutional order.... By banning health preserving abortion, Idaho attempts to deny this fundamental right on the basis that the threat of harm comes from a fetus, which depends on the woman for survival. But a pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim....
The Court thus holds that the right to a health-preserving abortion is one of the liberties guaranteed by the Due Process Clause. Idaho may not criminalize abortions deemed medically necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life or prevent serious and long-term impairments to her health unless the restriction is narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest. A blanket ban on health-preserving abortions is not narrowly tailored.
... Idaho also may not criminalize abortions that are necessary to prevent the death of the woman from self-harm. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment restricts states’ authority to privilege or disadvantage different classes of citizens..... The brain is an organ of the body, and healthcare providers use empirical tools to reliably assess the risk of suicidality and the most effective treatments. It is an affront to human dignity to bar pregnant women from receiving life-saving care on the basis that the threat comes from a mental health condition rather than a physical health condition.
The final question concerns Idaho’s ban on abortion when the fetus will die shortly after birth and for high-order pregnancies where the termination of one fetus increases the chance that the others will survive.... [F]or women without an elevated health risk, no fundamental right is at stake. Under these circumstances, the state remains free to prohibit abortion as long as the restriction is rationally related to a legitimate state interest. Here, Idaho’s policy forces women to remain pregnant for weeks or months knowing that the outcome will be to watch their child die, often within minutes of birth. Nonetheless, the law is rationally related to the state’s interests in, for example, preventing abortions based on mistaken fetal diagnoses and affirming the dignity of people with profound disabilities. This aspect of Idaho’s abortion ban passes constitutional muster....
The Lawyering Project issued a press release announcing the decision and has posted links to all the pleadings in the case.
Immediately, the Idaho Attorney General announced that he would be appealing the case and sought an emergency stay of the injunction, pending appeal. In an August 25 decision, the district court narrowed the injunction to ban enforcement only against the plaintiff in the case while the appeal is pending, rather than more broadly against all doctors. KTVB News reports on these developments.
On August 26, Idaho's Attorney General filed an emergency motion and a memorandum in support of it asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the district court's injunction while an appeal is pending. Zeale News reports on this filing.
