Two days after being hit with a lawsuit over a legal opinion that said Idaho’s abortion ban prohibits medical providers from referring patients out-of-state for abortion services, the state’s attorney general said Friday that he is rescinding the analysis.
Attorney General Raúl Labrador said a letter from his office had been “mischaracterized as law enforcement guidance sent out publicly to local prosecutors and others.”
“It was not a guidance document, nor was it ever published by the Office of the Attorney General,” he wrote in the letter to state GOP Rep. Brent Crane, adding: “Accordingly, I hereby withdraw it.”
Labrador’s initial letter to Crane last month said that the state’s near-total abortion ban “prohibits an Idaho medical provider from either referring a woman across state lines to access abortion services or prescribing abortion pills for the woman to pick up across state lines.”
Friday’s letter injects fresh uncertainty into whether the lawsuit filed on Tuesday by Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky and two doctors in Idaho will continue.
US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill on Friday said the withdrawal does suggest “that the urgency behind the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order may have been somewhat or completely abated.”
Brian Church, an attorney for Labrador, told the judge that the attorney general’s new letter makes it as though his March 27 letter “were never written.”
But that didn’t appear to assuage the concerns raised by a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who told Winmill that he wasn’t presently prepared to withdraw his motion for a temporary restraining order, which would prevent the state from enforcing the guidance for a short period of time before hearings are held in the case.
“I mean, Mr….
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