For the first time since Roe v. Wade fell, a federal judge ruled the Constitution protects abortion in Idaho.
Legislators there barred doctors from ending a pregnancy to save a woman who might take her own life. Mental health was the leading killer of Idaho’s pregnant women, according to the state’s own maternal mortality committee. The judge ruled that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion when her pregnancy threatens her life or her health, and he blocked the state from prosecuting her doctors for performing one.
The narrow ruling applies only to women in Idaho whose pregnancies endanger their bodies or their minds, and the state will most certainly appeal. But for three years, every federal courthouse said no constitutional right to abortion survived. Tonight a judge said one did.
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