The Justice Department plans to drop a Biden-era challenge to Idaho’s law banning abortion in nearly all circumstances, a move that could end access to most abortions for women in the state whose pregnancy poses serious health risks, according to a court filing on Tuesday.
The decision represents one of the first major steps under President Trump to roll back former Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s efforts to blunt the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
The Trump administration plans to “dismiss its claims in the above case, without prejudice” as early as Wednesday, a lawyer with the department’s civil division wrote in an email to lawyers for the state’s largest hospital system.
The action would effectively lift a federal appellate court’s hold on parts of the near-total ban, which was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature in 2020 in anticipation of the nullification of the national right to an abortion.
Excerpts from the government’s email were included in a request in Federal District Court by the Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System for a new temporary freeze to give it time to adjust to the law, which bans all abortions other than those required to prevent a woman’s death, or in certain cases of rape or incest.
Hospitals in Idaho need the temporary delay “to train their staff about the change in legal obligations” and to arrange logistics “to airlift patients out of state” if they require an abortion rendered illegal in Idaho, wrote Wendy J. Olson, a lawyer for the system.
Idaho’s Defense of Life Act imposes up to five years in prison on anyone who provides an abortion, other than in the limited exemptions. Health providers who violate the law can lose their professional licenses in the state.
The Justice Department, under Mr. Garland, sued Idaho in 2022, saying it violated a 1986 federal law that requires hospitals to provide stabilizing medical care in all emergency situations. Historically, that has included providing abortions in the event of severe, but not necessarily life-threatening, emergencies.
In June last year, the Supreme Court referred the case back to a federal appeals court, leaving the hold on the ban in place pending the lower court’s ruling.
“President Trump has sided with a radical fringe position that would put doctors who act to save the lives of their patients in jail,” Deirdre Schifeling, of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Women may die because of these actions, and President Trump will be directly responsible.”
Mr. Trump, whose appointments to the Supreme Court sealed the fate of Roe, has expressed a wide array of opinions on abortion over the years.
In 1999, long before he decided to run for office, he described himself as “very pro-choice.”
But as a candidate and president, he courted anti-abortion activists and cheered the overturning of Roe. He took various stances on the issue in the run-up to the 2024 election, suggesting he would support a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks gestation but saying on other occasions he wanted to leave such decisions to states.
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