Summary

• Four women are suing the state of Idaho after they were denied abortions for fatal fetal abnormalities.

• The lawsuit seeks to clarify medical exemptions from Idaho’s strict abortion laws.

• The plaintiffs will testify about their experiences in court on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Four women suing the state of Idaho after being denied abortions will testify Tuesday and Wednesday about their experiences traveling out of state to end nonviable pregnancies.

The lawsuit at the center of the upcoming trial in Ada County District Court seeks to clarify medical exceptions to Idaho’s strict abortion laws. The plaintiffs are the Idaho Academy of Family Physicians, two doctors and the four women testifying this week who learned during pregnancy that their fetuses were unlikely to survive.

The lawsuit, filed last year, claims the woman suffered “unimaginable tragedies and health risks due to Idaho’s abortion ban” and that Idaho doctors lack sufficient guidance on when they can perform the procedure without risking jail time.

Idaho has two laws restricting abortion: At its strictest, terminating a pregnancy at any stage is a crime, with limited exceptions, and providers who break the law face two to five years in prison. A second law allows citizens to sue health care providers who perform abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Neither policy makes an exception for fatal fetal abnormalities, which are the focus of the lawsuit.

“We’re not trying to tell Idaho how to write its laws. We’re just saying the laws as written don’t work,” said Nick Kabat, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents the plaintiffs.

Idaho Governor Brad Little and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador are defendants in the suit. Labrador’s office declined to comment, and Little’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The Idaho case is similar to Zurawski v. Texas, a lawsuit the Center for Reproductive Rights filed last year. In May, The Texas Supreme Court ruled against the 20 plaintiffsWHO they were denied abortions in the state despite dangerous pregnancy complications.

Kabat said he’s optimistic about a different outcome this time because “in Texas, we didn’t get to go to trial.”

Rebecca Vincen-Brown, a plaintiff who lives in Ada County, Idaho, said she is equally hopeful.

Vincen-Brown learned last year, 16 weeks into her pregnancy, that her fetus had several abnormalities — including a compromised airway, a missing bladder and an underdeveloped heart and brain. DNA tests later revealed that the fetus had a rare chromosomal condition called triploidy. Her doctor told her that the pregnancy was not viable and that she would probably miscarry or have a stillbirth.

“There was no way in the world we were going to have a baby alive at the end,” Vincen-Brown said.

She and her husband decided to terminate the pregnancy at 17 weeks so as not to jeopardize her health or fertility. Because this was not allowed in Idaho, they drove seven hours to Portland, Oregon. After the first day of the two-day procedure, Vincen-Brown passed the fetus in the hotel bathroom around 4 a.m. with her 2-year-old daughter in the other room.

“Deciding to have an abortion was probably the hardest decision of our lives, but the trauma that came with it when we left for Portland was completely unnecessary and 100 percent preventable,” she said.

The lawsuit claims Idaho’s laws violate pregnant women’s rights to safety and equal protection, as well as doctors’ rights to practice medicine under the state constitution. It asks the court to declare that Idaho doctors can provide abortion care in three specific scenarios:

• A pregnant person has a medical complication that makes it unsafe to continue the pregnancy or poses a risk of infection or bleeding.

• A pregnant person has an underlying medical condition that is aggravated by pregnancy, cannot be treated effectively, or requires recurrent, invasive intervention.

• A fetus is unlikely to survive pregnancy or birth.

The trial follows elections where abortion was a key issue and seven states have adopted measures to protect itincluding two (Missouri and Arizona) that overturned existing bans. The case is one of many ongoing legal challenges to the abortion ban. The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments Monday about whether the state can enforce an 1849 abortion ban.

In April, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in another case challenging Idaho’s total abortion ban — that suit argued that state law violated federal policy requiring certain standards for emergency care. The judges dismissed the case in Junesending it back to an appeals court.

Idaho’s two abortion bans went into effect in August 2022, about two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state’s six-week restriction makes exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of a pregnant woman or to prevent “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” The blanket ban, meanwhile, makes exceptions for doctors who decide an abortion is necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life and for cases of rape and incest. However, abortions in these cases must be completed in the first trimester, and the pregnant person must report the incident to law enforcement.

Yet another Idaho law makes it a crime to help a pregnant minor travel out of state for an abortion, but that has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

In this week’s lawsuit, Kabat said his legal team plans to argue that Idaho’s abortion bans will result in deaths if the exceptions are not further clarified. However, such deaths are almost impossible to track because the state refused to renew its Maternal Mortality Review Board, which investigated pregnancy-related deaths, so it expired in July 2023.

“It may be that someone died in Idaho, but there was no one there to really evaluate that death,” Kabat said.