PanamaTimes

Sunday, Oct 25, 2026

Post-Roe, states struggle with conflicting abortion bans

Post-Roe, states struggle with conflicting abortion bans

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 challenging a 173-year-old abortion ban, arguing that modern generations never consented to it. The 1849 law prohibits abortion in every instance except to save the pregnant person’s life — conflicting with Wisconsin laws from the mid-1980s that ban the procedure after a fetus reaches the point that it could survive outside the womb with medical intervention.

Arizona GOP officials disagree over which abortion laws are enforceable. Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced Wednesday that a pre-statehood law banning all abortions is now enforceable, but Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has said a law he signed in March takes precedence over the 1901 ban.

When the Idaho Legislature passed a trigger law in 2020 that would automatically prohibit nearly all abortions 30 days after the fall of Roe, lawmakers took some steps to avoid conflicts by making it clear that the law would supersede other bans. Lawmakers put similar language in another ban passed earlier this year, saying the 2020 law would take precedence.

But they may have overlooked a few clauses in the decades-old statutes.

The 2020 trigger law says specifically that the person seeking the abortion can’t be charged with a crime, instead focusing prosecution efforts on the abortion provider. That would seem to override a 1973 law that makes it a felony for a person to undergo an abortion, but it’s not clear if another portion of the older law making it a felony to knowingly aid in an abortion could still be enforceable.

“It’s hard to see how much of it survives, because of all the conflicts,” Twin Falls County prosecutor Grant Loebs said of the nearly three dozen anti-abortion laws on the books in Idaho.

It will be up to individual county prosecutors, at first, to decide how to proceed, said Loebs, who is also president of the Idaho Prosecuting Attorneys Association. From there, judges will figure it out.

Ultimately, he expects Idaho legislators will have a lot of fine-tuning to do in the years ahead.

“I think every state doing this is going to have the same problems,” Loebs said.

Planned Parenthood is suing over both of Idaho’s newer laws. It has asked the Idaho Supreme Court to hear arguments in both cases on the same day in early August in hopes of getting a ruling before the trigger law takes effect.

Jared Keenan, Legal Director at American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said there has been “hectic” activity in the post-Roe v. Wade world.

“That’s the nature of civil rights litigation,” Keenan said. “I think that the difference here is that it has thrown a lot of organizations and a lot of attorneys into this sort of manic scramble all at the same time, which is not so common.”
Newsletter

Related Articles

PanamaTimes
0:00
0:00
Close
Advertising trick: Pepsi’s Harrier Jet Commercial Led to a $700,000 Court Fight
Why 2027 Could Be a Strong Year for Stocks—and Why the Forecast Is Fragile
Trump’s Top General Seeks an Exit Strategy From Iran War, Report Says
Brock Lesnar Retires From Wrestling, Closing a Career of Rare Athletic Range and Lasting Controversy
Trump-Era Policy Shifts Test the Boundaries of U.S. Institutions
Weight-Loss Drug Boom Tests the Limits of Prescription Advertising Rules
Breaking With the Past: One of the World’s Smallest Countries Changes Its Name
AI Is Remaking the US Economy, From GDP Growth to iPhone Prices
Cuba’s Grid Fails Again as Fuel Crisis Deepens
Nazca Lines Flight Crash Kills Thirteen as Peru Suspends Aerodiana
OpenAI Faces Demands for Full Disclosure After Models Breach Hugging Face
FIFA’s Private-Investment Plan for World Cup Rights Draws European Revolt
Why Americans Queue for $15 Ice Cream and a $100 Caviar Pint
OpenAI Sued After ChatGPT Allegedly Discouraged Emergency Care Before Near-Fatal Embolism
Miliband Sets Climate and International Law at Centre of UK Diplomacy
Trump Readies New Tariffs as Temporary Global Levy Nears Expiry
Morgan Stanley Builds a Wall Street Lead in AI Infrastructure Finance
High Prices Push Coffee Drinkers Toward Whole Beans and Home Brewing
Spain Defeats Argentina in Extra Time to Win Second World Cup
Venezuela’s Earthquake Devastation Turns U.S. Investment Opportunity Into a Thirty-Seven Billion Dollar Reconstruction Challenge
Ukrainian Drones Strike Wildberries Warehouses Deep Inside Russia
The Ledger Will Not Trust on Faith
Trump Administration Pressures Banks to Restrict Financial Access for Undocumented Immigrants
The Ten World Cup Finals That Defined Football History
Smartphones Are Getting More Expensive, Sales Are Collapsing, and Even Apple Admits: "Prices Will Rise"
The AI Race Enters Its Infrastructure Era
Colombia Influencer Dies After Cosmetic Procedure at Unlicensed Bogota Salon
A Quiet Bastille Day: France Grapples with World Cup Heartbreak and Leftover Fireworks
Spain in Ecstasy: "We Feel Unbeatable, We Taught the Whole World a Lesson"
On the Island That Did Not Yield to Trump, There Is No Electricity, and 10 Million Live in Darkness
World Cup Visitors Turn American Big-Box Stores Into Souvenir Stops
Anthropic Reengineers Agentic Architecture to Shift Autonomous Workplace Automation to the Cloud
Global Crisis Alert: Escalating Middle East Tensions and UK Political Upheaval
Japanese Technology Firm Fujitsu Launches Advanced Artificial Intelligence Tool for Corporate Disclosures
South Africa Officially Launches Nationwide Campaign for Highly Contested Local Government Elections
United Kingdom Commits Additional Funding for Unexploded Ordnance Clearance in Laos
Singapore Announces Stringent New Greenhouse Gas Regulations for Commercial Cooling Systems
Cambodia and Thailand Hold High-Level Border Security Talks at United Nations Headquarters
Myanmar Military Government and China Sign Major Agreement to Upgrade Media and Cultural Cooperation
Knife Attack at Swiss Train Station Leaves Three Injured in Suspected Act of Domestic Terrorism
Transnational Extortion Gang Threatens Canadian Police With Army of One Thousand Armed Operatives
Australia Imposes Forty-Two-Day Quarantine on Cruise Ship Passengers Following Deadly Hantavirus Outbreak
International Monetary Fund Unlocks Seven Hundred Million United States Dollars for Sri Lanka Following Economic Reforms
Australia Launches Record One Point Four Billion Dollar Lawsuit Against Chemical Giant 3M Over Contamination
China and Canada Foreign Ministers Meet in Ottawa in Effort to Stabilize Strained Diplomatic Ties
Indonesia Demands Urgent United Nations Security Council Reform Amid Escalating Global Conflicts
Extreme Weather Patterns Trigger Severe Drought in Madagascar and Destructive Flooding in East Africa
Indian State of Karnataka Faces Political Upheaval as Chief Minister Siddaramaiah Abruptly Resigns
Philippines and Japan Reaffirm Defense Ties as Crucial for Indo-Pacific Regional Stability
Norway Joins French Nuclear Deterrence Initiative in Major Shift for European Security Architecture
×