The 2018 Idaho Legislature passed new invasive abortion reporting requirements. The bill, 2018 House Bill 638, requires health care providers throughout Idaho to report on more than 37 new so-called abortion “complications,” ranging from medical conditions that have no link to abortion, like breast cancer, to the inability to come in for a follow-up appointment, which is not a medical condition. The reporting requirement doesn’t exist for any other medical procedure. Providers will now face potential criminal and civil penalties and professional discipline, which could result in the loss of their medical license, for non-compliance with these unconstitutionally vague and overreaching reporting requirements. Furthermore, the information gathered by these requirements is not protected from disclosure, putting patient and provider privacy at risk.
With Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the law firm Ferguson Durham PLLC, we filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the bill because the law violates constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection by arbitrarily singling out one particular medical procedure and requiring invasive reporting that has nothing to do with protecting patient health care.
The lawsuit is currently on appeal at the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
