Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands (PPGNHI) filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Idaho’s Abortion Complications Reporting Act which went into effect July 1st.
The legislation details 37 abortion complications that must be reported to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare including infection, blood clots, and hemorrhaging. The bill also requires that any psychological conditions following an abortion be reported such as depression, anxiety, and sleeping disorders.
It mandates that abortion providers report the number of times their patients have had past abortions and other information about the patients including age, race, and number of children.
The law argues that “to facilitate reliable scientific studies and research on the safety and efficacy of abortion, it is essential that the medical and public health communities have access to accurate information both on the abortion procedure and on complications resulting from abortion.”
However, Planned Parenthood, along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho (ACLU), is claiming that the law is unconstitutional and invasive.
"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," according to Planned Parenthood. "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 unconstitutional, vague and overreaching reporting requirements. Furthermore, the information gathered by these requirements is not protected from disclosure, putting patient and provider privacy at risk."
“This is another attempt by Idaho politicians to shame and stigmatize people seeking abortion care and to spread the myth that abortion is dangerous,” Hannah Brass Greer, Chief Legal Counsel at PPGNHI said of the law, “These reporting requirements burden patients and their medical providers and represent another example of government overreach by Idaho politicians. This law is unconstitutional and should be struck down.”
Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden's spokesman Scott Graf declined to comment to the Associated Press on the lawsuit, citing the ongoing litigation.
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