BOISE, Idaho (AP) – 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.