BOISE, Idaho — In Arizona, Republicans are fighting among themselves over whether a 121-year-old anti-abortion law from the pre-statehood Wild West days, when Arizona was still a frontier mining territory, should be enforced over a 2022 version.
In Idaho, meanwhile, it is not clear whether a pair of laws from the early 1970s making it a felony to “knowingly aid” in an abortion or to publish information about how to induce one will be enforced alongside the state’s newer, near-total ban.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has advocates, prosecutors and residents of red states facing a legal morass created by decades of often conflicting anti-abortion legislation.
Politicians and state government attorneys are trying to sort out which laws and which provisions are in force. And abortion rights advocates who are going to court to protect the right to terminate a pregnancy are finding themselves doing battle on multiple fronts.
Lawyers in Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden’s office are going through all the state’s abortion statutes with a fine-tooth comb, said Wasden spokesman Scott Graf.
“Following last week’s decision, part of our subsequent work is to now review Idaho’s existing abortion-related laws and examine them through a post-Roe legal lens,” Graf said. “That work has commenced and will continue in the weeks ahead.”
On the abortion rights side, Hillary Schneller, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said Louisiana lawmakers had passed three “trigger” bans designed to go into effect in the event Roe was overturned.
When the Supreme Court decision came down, “state officials issued conflicting statements about those bans,” Schneller said. “We challenged all of them on vagueness grounds to try to get some clarity about what the status of the law is in Louisiana.”
Jennifer Sandman, a senior attorney for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the confusing and “very rapidly shifting landscape both legally and operationally” is putting more stress on abortion providers.
“I think multiple health care providers across the country are figuring out how to navigate that moment,” Sandman said.
In West Virginia, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging an abortion ban that was put on the books in 1882. The organization says the law conflicts with newer ones and so should be void.
In Wisconsin, Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit Tuesday…
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