Idaho Federation of Teachers v. Labrador

On August 8, 2023, the ACLU, the ACLU of Idaho, Professor Seth Kreimer, and law firm Strindberg Scholnick Birch Hallam Harstad Thorne filed a lawsuit in Idaho to challenge that state’s No Public Funds for Abortion Act (“NPFAA”). The NPFAA criminalizes the use of any public finds to “promote abortion” or “counsel in favor of abortion.” The statute is part of a flurry of recent anti-abortion legislation in Idaho but also represents a novel attack on speech related to abortion.

The plaintiffs in this case are two teachers’ unions—the Idaho Federation of Teachers and the University of Idaho Teachers Federation, Local 3215 of the American Federation of Teachers—and six university professors, who teach at the University of Idaho and Boise State University. Our Plaintiffs teach about abortion across diverse disciplines, including bioethics, philosophy, history, literature, political science, sociology, journalism, and social work. As a result of the NPFAA, they excised modules out of course curricula, removed reading assignments, avoided lectures or classroom discussions, refrained from substantive feedback on student research and writing, and ceased their own scholarship or promotion of their scholarship about abortion.

They argued that the NPFAA violates the First Amendment by restricting the academic speech of faculty at Idaho’s public universities. They also argued that the NPFAA violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which prohibits vague laws, because the NPFAA’s plain text leaves unclear where the NPFAA draws the line between permissible speech and speech that “promotes” or “counsels in favor of” abortion.

The NPFAA is one of many attempts in Idaho to attack reproductive health care—and information about this essential care—in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Dobbs ruling allowed Idaho’s criminal ban on abortion to go into effect, prohibiting virtually all abortion care. In its wake, the Idaho Attorney General issued a legal opinion claiming that health care providers cannot refer patients out of state for abortion care under Idaho’s ban—a threat that was subsequently blocked by a federal court for blatantly violating the free speech rights of physicians to make appropriate medical referrals. And the state legislature in 2023 passed a law that criminalizes assisting a pregnant minor to obtain abortion care in states where abortion is still legal, and even explicitly protected.

This case is part of the ACLU’s ongoing efforts to combat emerging speech restrictions on abortion following Dobbs, including West Alabama Women’s Center v. Marshall, Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Indiana, Kentucky v. Labrador, and Guam Society of OBGYNS v. Guerrero. It is also part of the ACLU’s ongoing efforts to protect academic freedom, including in Pernell v. Lamb and BERT v. O’Connor.