Need treatment your doctor doesn't support? Under new Idaho law, they can deny it

Sarah Cutler, Idaho Statesman on Mar 20, 2025

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Idaho medical providers can now decline to perform procedures that violate their personal beliefs, after Gov. Brad Little signed a new law Wednesday.

The law allows practitioners to decline procedures that violate “sincerely held religious, moral or ethical beliefs. That can include a mental health counselor declining to work with a veteran because she opposes war, or a doctor declining to provide an abortion to a woman who was raped, even though Idaho law allows it, Senate Democrats said on the floor.

“We’re basically talking out of both sides of our mouth on that,” Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, told senators. “Do we either provide the emergency care for the 13-year-old who’s pregnant because they’ve been raped by a father, or an uncle, or a brother, or do we allow the physician to reject it, and now we put the patient in a terrible position again?”

Sen. Carl Bjerke, R-Coeur d’Alene, who cosponsored House Bill 59, argued that COVID-19 had enforced conformity among medical professionals, who were at times censured for expressing concerns about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. “Corporatization” of medicine, he said, is preventing doctors from giving patients honest advice.

“Don’t you want the doctor to tell you the truth?” he asked on the Senate floor.

But Dr. David Pate, the former CEO and president of St. Luke’s Health System, argued that the bill was instead giving priority to health care providers’ individual preferences rather than patient needs. The bill’s title, which refers to defending providers’ medical ethics, “misrepresents the core principles of medical ethics, which are duties and obligations owed by health care providers to patients, not to health care providers,” he said.

“We do not impose our beliefs, our attitudes, our religion on our patients,” Pate told the Statesman by email.

Opponents of the bill also raised the alarm about its vague wording and argued that such a law could be catastrophic for Idahoans, especially in rural areas with already-limited access to health care, Taylor said.

“This bill is not just reckless — it gives health care workers a license to discriminate,” Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, the Idaho state director for Planned Parenthood, said in a news release. “No one should be denied care because of someone else’s personal beliefs. Health care must be driven by medical expertise, not ideology.”

Bjerke argued that the bill could help to address Idaho’s shortage of medical professionals. On the Senate floor, he cited testimony from a constituent who served as president of Washington State Medical Association and said there had been a “chilling of speech” among physicians surrounding COVID-19 public health measures. Nationwide, Idaho has the fewest primary care doctors relative to its population.

But in surveys and interviews, many doctors who have left Idaho cited the state’s anti-abortion laws, which are causing fear, uncertainty and anxiety among physicians who could be charged with a felony for performing an abortion they deem medically necessary. A survey by the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare showed that most of the physicians who considered leaving the state cited the new laws as the main reason.

The law is set to take immediate effect.

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