Editor’s Note: Mary Ziegler (@maryrziegler) is the Martin Luther King Professor of Law at UC Davis. She is the author of “Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment” and “Roe: The History of a National Obsession.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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This week, Idaho passed the first law restricting travel for abortion. Framed as an “abortion trafficking” bill, it criminalizes anyone who helps a minor get an abortion or abortion pills without parental consent. Violators will face felony charges and up to five years in prison.
The law could treat anyone, from friends to grandparents, as traffickers. Even when parents consent, a defendant has to prove it using an affirmative defense, a job that usually belongs to prosecutors. Idaho Republicans presented the bill as a common-sense protection of parental rights. State Representative Barbara Ehardt, one of its sponsors, described it as a tool to “go after those who would subvert a parent’s right to be able to make those decisions in conjunction with their child.”
But make no mistake: Idaho’s bill is part of a broader attack on the right to travel for adults as well as minors, and the stakes of whittling away at that right are higher than ever.
To understand the intent behind the law, we can simply look at where it came from. It draws directly from a model developed by the National Right to Life Committee, a major national antiabortion group, in the summer of 2022. The model stressed that it would not be enough to enforce abortion bans, given that people could take advantage of “existing State laws on telehealth and the proximity of States with less protective laws” to circumvent criminal abortion laws. Idaho’s abortion trafficking law was presented not just as a step to protect parents, but part of a broader way to curtail abortion-related travel.
Starting with minors is a natural way for abortion opponents to test the waters of a legal prospect that — as a state law that openly seeks to restrict the ability to travel from one state to another by choice — seems to challenge a fundamental tenet of both federalism and freedom.
The law directly echoes a federal law on the sex trafficking of…
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