The summary

• Four women are suing the state of Idaho after being denied abortions due to fatal fetal abnormalities.

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

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

Four women who are suing the state of Idaho after being denied abortions will testify Tuesday and Wednesday about their experiences traveling out of state to terminate non-viable pregnancies.

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

The suit, filed last year, argues that the woman suffered “unimaginable tragedy and health risks due to Idaho’s abortion bans,” and that Idaho doctors lack sufficient guidance to know when they can perform the procedure without risking a prison sentence.

Idaho has two laws restricting abortion: Under the strictest version, terminating a pregnancy at any stage, with few exceptions, is a crime, and providers who break the law face two to five years in prison. A second law allows individuals 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 subject of the lawsuit.

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

Idaho Governor Brad Little and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador are defendants in the lawsuit. 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 filed last year by the Center for Reproductive Rights. In May, the Texas Supreme Court rules against 20 plaintiffsWHO were refused an abortion in the state despite dangerous complications of pregnancy.

Kabat said he was optimistic that he would get a different result this time because “in Texas, we weren’t able to go to trial.”

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

Vincen-Brown learned last year, at 16 weeks pregnant, that her fetus had several abnormalities, including a compromised airway, a missing bladder and a heart and brain that were not properly developed. DNA testing later revealed that the fetus suffered from a rare chromosomal disorder called triploidy. Her doctor told her the pregnancy was not viable and she would likely miscarry or have a stillborn child.

“In no world would we have a baby alive at the end,” Vincen-Brown said.

She and her husband decided to terminate the pregnancy at 17 weeks to avoid endangering her health or fertility. Since this was not allowed in Idaho, they drove seven hours to Portland, Oregon. After the first day of the two-day procedure, Vincen-Brown gave birth 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 accompanied it when we went to Portland was completely unnecessary and could have been 100 percent preventable,” she said. .

The lawsuit alleges that Idaho 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 a pregnancy or poses a risk of infection or bleeding.

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

• It is unlikely that a fetus will survive pregnancy or childbirth.

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

In April, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments In another case challenging Idaho’s total abortion ban, this lawsuit alleged that the 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 took effect in August 2022, about two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state’s six-week restriction provides exceptions in cases of rape, incest and to save the life of a pregnant woman or prevent “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” The total ban, however, makes exceptions for doctors who decide that an abortion is necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life, as well as for cases of rape and incest. However, in these cases, abortions must be performed during the first trimester and the pregnant person must report the incident to law enforcement.

Another Idaho law makes it a crime to help a pregnant minor travel out of state to get an abortion, but that was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

At this week’s trial, Kabat said his legal team intends to argue that Idaho’s abortion bans will lead to deaths if the exceptions are not further clarified. Such deaths are almost impossible to track, however, because the state refused to renew its Maternal Mortality Review Board, which investigated pregnancy-related deaths, and therefore expired in July 2023.

“There may have been someone who died in Idaho, but there was no one there to really assess that death,” Kabat said.