Trial began this week in another major abortion case, Adkins v. Idaho, that highlights the immense challenges new bans have created for patients and doctors. It may be that Adkins is a long shot: The case will likely end at the Idaho Supreme Court, which already seemed to reject constitutional arguments against its state law. But win or lose, cases like Adkins make a difference by dramatizing some of the harshest effects of state abortion laws. These are the stories that may give Republicans pause about a potential backlash if they consider aggressive new federal limits on abortion.

Idaho has one of the most stringent abortion bans in the nation. It allows abortion only if the life of the patient is threatened, and even then, doctors have to prove that they were justified in proceeding rather than prosecutors’ having to do so. That medical exception is even stricter than usual for state laws in applying only to threats to life.

That’s why the Biden administration challenged it under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (a lawsuit that is likely to come to an end when the Trump administration reverses course on the issue of emergency access). Now a trial judge is hearing the stories of four women and three physicians affected by Idaho’s Defense of Life Act. Jennifer Adkins and three other women were pregnant when they received almost certainly fatal fetal diagnoses. All four were told that if their pregnancies continued, they could face severe health threats. They and the physician plaintiffs seek to establish that Idaho’s law allows an abortion whenever a patient has a physical medical condition or complication that makes it unsafe to continue a pregnancy, has a condition exacerbated by pregnancy that can’t otherwise be easily treated, or is told about a fetal condition that is likely to be fatal after birth.

Adkins builds on a line of cases involving women like Kate Cox, a Texas woman who traveled out of state to seek an abortion after receiving a diagnosis of trisomy 18, a fetal condition that is usually fatal; and Amanda Zurawski, also from Texas, who suffered the preterm rupture of membranes, a condition that led to a severe infection that almost........

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