BOISE, Idaho ( Associated Press) — In Arizona, Republicans are fighting among themselves about whether Arizona was still a marginal mining area, a miscarriage from the pre-state Wild West days when Arizona was still a marginal mining area. The antitrust law should be enforced. 2022 edition.
In Idaho, meanwhile, it’s unclear whether a pair of laws since the early 1970s are making it a felony to “deliberately assist” in abortion or to publish information about how to induce one. To be implemented with the new, near-total of the state. Sanctions.
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The US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has advocates, prosecutors and residents of red states facing a legal quagmire created by decades of often conflicting anti-abortion legislation.
Politicians and state government lawyers are trying to find out which laws and which provisions are applicable. And abortion rights advocates who are going to court to defend the right to terminate a pregnancy are finding themselves fighting on multiple fronts.
Waden’s spokesman Scott Graf said lawyers in Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden’s office are looking at all of the state’s abortion statutes with a fine-toothed comb.
“Following last week’s decision, part of our subsequent work is now to review Idaho’s existing abortion-related laws and examine them through the legal lens following Roe’s,” Graf said. “That work has started and will continue in the coming weeks.”
In West Virginia, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging the abortion ban that was put on the books in 1882. The organization maintains that the law conflicts with the newcomers and should therefore be void.
“We will not stand until this state is pulled back into the 1800s,” Lori Stark, the organization’s legal director, said in a statement. “Every day the uncertainty remains that the ability to enforce this law is another day West Virginians are being denied vital, life-saving health care.”
In Wisconsin, Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a 173-year-old abortion ban, arguing that modern generations never consented to it. The 1849 law prohibits abortion in every instance other than saving the life of the pregnant person—contradictory with Wisconsin laws from the mid-1980s that banned the procedure after the fetus has reached the point that it is pregnant. Can survive with outside medical intervention.
Arizona GOP officials disagree about which abortion laws apply. Attorney General Mark Branovich announced Wednesday that an ex-state law banning all abortions is now enforceable, but Republican Governor Doug Ducey has said the law he signed in March would replace the 1901 ban. But takes precedence.
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When the Idaho Legislature passed a “trigger law” in 2020 that would automatically ban nearly all abortions 30 days after Roe’s fall, lawmakers took some steps to avoid conflicts, by clarifying that The law would remove other restrictions. Lawmakers poured similar language into another ban passed earlier this year, saying the 2020 law would take precedence.
But they may have overlooked some clauses in the decades-old statutes.
The 2020 trigger law specifically states that a person seeking an abortion cannot be charged with a crime, instead focusing prosecution efforts on the abortion provider. This appears to override a 1973 law that made it a crime to undergo an abortion, but it is unclear whether another part of the older law made it a crime to knowingly assist in abortion. However, it can be implemented.
Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs said of the nearly three dozen anti-abortion laws on the books in Idaho, “It’s hard to see how much of it survives because of all the conflict.”
Loebs, who is also president of the Idaho Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said deciding how to proceed will first be up to individual county prosecutors. From there the judge will find out.
Ultimately, he hopes Idaho legislators will have a lot to fix in the coming years.
“I think every state that does this is going to have similar problems,” Loebs said.
All of this means a lot of juggling for abortion rights advocates.
Planned Parenthood is suing both of Idaho’s new laws. It has asked the Idaho Supreme Court to hear arguments in both cases on the same day in early August, hoping to make a decision before the trigger law goes into effect.
