The Planned Parenthood clinic in Spokane, Washington, is just a 30-minute drive from the Idaho border, and since May, when Idaho’s “abortion trafficking” law went into effect, it’s been sitting on a timebomb.
Like many blue-state abortion clinics, the Spokane health center has been inundated with patients from out of state since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade a year ago in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, allowing abortion to be banned outright or severely restricted in many states. In Spokane, they have received patients from as far away as Texas and Florida. But the new law in Idaho, which criminalizes anyone who helps a minor travel out of state for an abortion without the permission of their parents, threatens this already unsustainable reality. It is the first effort to criminalize travel for the purposes of abortion, and to make the state’s ban on abortion within its borders into something more like a ban on its citizens accessing abortion anywhere.
