BOISE, ID – Idaho’s Republican supermajority-controlled Legislature plans to keep Idaho’s strict abortion ban laws largely untouched this year.

In 2024, Idaho lawmakers held off on changing the state’s abortion bans while lawmakers waited on the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a lawsuit by the Biden administration challenging Idaho’s bans, the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported.

That decision came despite Idaho doctors requesting an exception for mothers’ health — not just their lives — as many doctors say they struggle to know when to provide emergency abortions under Idaho’s abortion bans. Doctors have said Idaho’s laws have resulted in patients being emergency air-lifted to other states and has spurred obstetric and gynecology doctors to leave Idaho — which is already in a doctor shortage.

In January, just before the 2025 Idaho legislative session began, Idaho Gov. Brad Little and House Speaker Mike Moyle signaled lawmakers would keep waiting on lawsuits to resolve before changing Idaho’s abortion laws.

Since then, major litigation challenging Idaho’s abortion bans shifted from being led by the federal government to Idaho’s largest health system. A federal judge recently reissued temporary court protections that allowed emergency abortions in Idaho.

The Idaho Legislature, a part-time statehouse, is presumably winding down for the year. But the Legislature’s official end will likely be delayed by the powerful budget committee’s unfinished work to set state budgets, the Sun reported.

Rep. Crane says doctor will be more comfortable as time passes

Doctors are not being prosecuted, and as time passes, they’ll be more comfortable under the laws, Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, who chairs the House State Affairs Committee that typically handles abortion legislation, told the Sun in an interview Thursday.

“It’s fairly late in the session, so trying to figure out any fix now isn’t going to happen,” Crane told the Sun, saying only two to three weeks remained for the legislative session.

“The more that this plays out, I think doctors are going to become more comfortable with it and understand the true intent behind the law,” he added. “So we’ll just let it play out and see … if there is need for legislative intervention.”

But the Idaho Academy of Family Physicians says doctors are “in an impossible situation.”

“Without clarity, our doctors are being put in an impossible situation — either risk facing punishment for providing care or turn their patients away against their medical training and ethical duties,” the academy’s Executive Director Liz Woodruff told the Sun in a written statement. “We have already lost too many health care practitioners to other states. This is not sustainable, and we need change now. Doctors should be allowed to practice medicine the way they are trained and for the safety of Idahoans.”

Idaho House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, called the Republican-controlled Legislature’s stance to keep waiting to change Idaho’s abortion bans “catastrophic.”

“We don’t know if next week” temporary emergency abortion court protections “could go away, and we’re right back to women getting airlifted out of the state, and women having catastrophic, lifelong health problems — due to our laws,” she told the Sun in an interview.

Asked why waiting on lawsuits is the right approach, Crane drew a comparison with Idaho’s library harmful materials for children law — which book publishers and authors sued over.

“Let the court make some ruling on some of these, so we know where the court is at. And then we can respond,” he told the Sun. “We might go and try to change it here, and all of a sudden, the court heads over here. Now we gotta change that. And you’re just constantly chasing your tail.”

Hitting brick wall with Legislature, people shifted hope to ballot initiative, Idaho House Democrat leader says

Last year, Idaho doctors held an hour-long presentation in the Idaho State Capitol — pleading with lawmakers for a maternal health exemption, saying lack of clarity under Idaho’s abortion laws has worsened Idaho’s long-standing doctor shortage.

This year, there weren’t stark public calls for action in the Statehouse.

Rubel said people hit a “brick wall,” realized no health exception bill would be considered, and turned to a ballot initiative collecting signatures for abortion exemptions for emergencies, fetal viability and other reproductive health protections in the 2026 Idaho general election.

“It’s for when your pleas land on deaf ears in the Legislature,” Rubel said.  Melanie Folwell, spokesperson for the group behind the ballot initiative, Idahoans United for Women and Families, told the Sun in a written statement “the only path forward is clear.”

“Our doctors and hospitals have continued to ask for a fix to Idaho’s near-total abortion ban. And for three years, the legislature has declined to provide a solution to the very problem they created,” she said. “Luckily, citizen initiatives can answer the call when politicians fail us: the only path forward is clear.”

Idaho’s abortion ban doesn’t include explicit health exception. But Rep. Crane suggests law gives doctors discretion.

Idaho has several abortion ban laws that, if violated, could allow doctors to be prosecuted and lose their medical licenses and even allow them to be sued for at least $20,000 by family members of a person who obtained an abortion.

In a survey for Boise State University’s annual Idaho Public Policy Survey last year, 64% of Idahoans said the state should at least have exceptions for documented rape cases, incest, non-viable pregnancies and both the life and health of the mother.

Idaho’s ban contains an exception to save the pregnant patient’s life, but not to prevent detrimental health outcomes, including the loss of future fertility, which is a risk with severe infection or bleeding.

Without further clarity written into the law, doctors have said they can’t confidently assess when to safely intervene to save someone’s life and what constitutes a “good faith” judgment, States Newsroom reported.

Idaho Republican officials — including Crane and Attorney General Raúl Labrador — have said attorneys are not being honest with doctors about how Idaho’s abortion bans work.

Crane said he and Labrador met with OB-GYN doctors and found that their attorneys were misunderstanding what the law actually does.

“In fairness and in defense to those attorneys representing the OB docs, attorneys’ typical position they will take is to try to mitigate as much risk as possible for their client. And so I think that they were taking a very overly broad, very cautious approach to what the law says,” Crane told the Sun. “But I think now that folks like myself, Labrador, (and anti-abortion activist David) Ripley have met with some of these OB docs and help them understand this is exactly what the law does, and you’re not going to be in trouble if you do X, I think it’s kind of tamped that down a little bit.”

Crane said the law was intended to “stop abortion on demand, or elective abortions,” which he said it has done. And he said the law lets doctors exercise discretion.

“The intent behind the law is — you guys are the professionals. You guys make that judgment call,” Crane said.

Rubel, an attorney, said “the laws are plain as day: That there is no health exception, that there is no emergency exception.”

But she said you don’t need to be an attorney to understand that.

“You just need to look at this bill, and it says it’s plain as day on its face that it is only permissible to avoid death. It is not permissible to avoid loss of body organs, loss of permanent fertility, (or) other catastrophic health consequences,” Rubel said.

Idaho senator introduces abortion bill to let judges dismiss lawsuits

The Senate State Affairs Committee on Wednesday introduced a bill that would let judges dismiss poorly founded abortion lawsuits against doctors.

Bill cosponsor Sen. Todd Lakey, R-Nampa, told the committee that the dismissal process in Senate Bill 1171 is modeled after a recently approved Idaho law that outlines how Idaho judges can quickly dismiss frivolous lawsuits — dubbed strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP lawsuits.

Crane called the new abortion lawsuit dismissal bill a “very small step” that had been in the works even before the U.S. Department of Justice dismissed its lawsuit challenging Idaho’s abortion ban.

To Rubel, it’s “cold comfort.”

“I feel like we’re seeing a lot of efforts to dance around and obfuscate how dangerous and terrifying Idaho’s abortion law is. They’re unwilling to wrestle with the actual law,” she told the Sun. “They’re unwilling to actually remove the dangerous prohibitions on emergency abortion care therein. But they want to look like they’re doing something, because they know that people are really upset.”

Expecting Trump administration to drop Idaho emergency abortion lawsuit, St. Luke’s filed its own

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Justice — under the Trump administration — dropped a lawsuit brought under the Biden administration that secured federal court protections to allow Idaho doctors to provide abortions in emergencies, States Newsroom reported.

Anticipating that move, in mid-January St. Luke’s Health System filed its own lawsuit against Idaho, seeking to extend emergency abortion court protections.

The health system’s lawsuit alleged a similar legal dispute than the Biden administration’s challenge: That Idaho’s abortion laws conflicted with a federal law, called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, that requires hospitals to provide stabilizing care in emergencies.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill granted a temporary restraining order in St. Luke’s lawsuit, essentially extending court protections for emergency abortions in Idaho that he allowed through a preliminary injunction in the DOJ’s case.

Since June 2024, when those federal court protections for emergency abortions in Idaho were in place, St. Luke’s doctors didn’t need to transfer any patients out of state, the health system told the Sun in January. Before then, when the federal protections lapsed, air transports out of state for pregnancy complications at St. Luke’s increased from one, in all of 2023, to six in the first four months of 2024, States Newsroom reported.

Last fall, another lawsuit in Idaho’s 4th Judicial District challenging Idaho’s abortion ban went to trial. But the judge has not yet issued a ruling.

This story first appeared on Idaho Capital Sun.