Biden administration wins legal challenge to Idaho abortion ban

The Biden administration has won a legal victory in its battle to protect women’s reproductive rights as a judge in Idaho stopped the state implementing a ban on abortions when the mother’s life is at risk.

Lynn Winmill, a federal district judge, on Wednesday blocked the state from enacting part of a law that would have stopped emergency doctors performing an abortion to prevent serious harm to the patient or save her life.

The injunction, which was enacted a day before the rule was due to take effect, will remain in place while the state and federal governments continue to argue their cases in court.

The ruling marks the first significant legal success for the Biden administration in its quest to protect abortion rights since the US Supreme Court overturned a legal precedent that established constitutional protection for the procedure.

Winmill said the Idaho rule would have violated a federal law that requires doctors in hospitals receiving public Medicare funds — the vast majority — to stabilise patients who arrive with emergency conditions.

“The physician may well find herself facing the impossible task of attempting to simultaneously comply with both federal and state law,” the judge wrote.

He added: “The court is called upon to address . . . whether Idaho’s criminal abortion statute conflicts with a small but important corner of federal legislation. It does.” As a result, he said, the state would be prevented from implementing the law while the case continues.

US abortion laws were thrown into turmoil earlier this summer when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, the decades-old ruling which guaranteed abortion rights to women across America.

The decision meant that many states automatically enacted so-called trigger bans on abortion — laws meant to snap into place if and when Roe was overturned.

Idaho’s rule was one of the most conservative of these trigger laws, effectively banning all abortions. But it threatened to contradict not only a decades-old federal law on emergency care but also more recent guidance put out by the Biden administration ordering hospitals receiving Medicare funds to perform abortions in medical emergencies.

Winmill’s ruling runs counter to a decision just a day earlier from a judge in Texas, who ruled that the new federal guidance should not over-rule that state’s abortion restrictions. With conflicting rulings beginning to proliferate in the lower courts, some lawyers predict the matter will end up back in the hands of the Supreme Court.