‘Unconstitutional’: Idaho parents, day care sue over Medical Freedom Act
A Boise-based day care sued in December over the Idaho Medical Freedom Act, a controversial 2025 law that lawyers argued won’t let the facility send sick kids home or require vaccines.
The Idaho Medical Freedom Act, signed by Gov. Brad Little on the last day of the 2025 legislative session, prevents schools, businesses and day cares from mandating medical interventions as a condition of employment, attendance or providing services. But the law gives private and parochial schools the ability to send kids home if they are sick.
The plaintiffs, Le Soleil Child Care LLC, and three parents who send or planned to send their students to the French immersion day care, declined an interview through their lawyers. The lawyers also declined an interview. The defendants are Attorney General Raúl Labrador and Ada County Prosecutor Jan Bennetts.
Lawyers for the two sides have been duking it out in court since the filing, with the plaintiffs asking for a preliminary injunction to block the law regarding day cares and both defendants asking the court to dismiss the case. The court has not yet ruled on either.
“The (law) is unconstitutional,” the plaintiffs’ lawsuit said. “… The government, in enacting and enforcing the (law), is interfering with parents’ fundamental rights to protect their children from preventable illness and to direct their education and upbringing.”
The governor’s office and the attorney general’s office declined to comment, citing pending litigation. A message to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office was not returned.
The biggest question in the lawsuit is how strictly the court will look at the law, said Benji Cover, a law professor at the University of Idaho.
If there’s a fundamental interest at stake, the court puts the burden on the state to justify its law. Often, the state will lose under such rigorous review, Cover said in a phone interview Friday.
But if there’s no fundamental interest, the burden would be on the individual and the court generally upholds laws that have a “rational connection to a legitimate government interest,” Cover said.
Courts have often said that general economic regulations don’t lead to the stricter test, Cover said.
However, the restriction on day cares requiring vaccines “is enough to raise some serious questions about is this just regulating some economic issues and some commercial transactions or is this actually interfering with some fundamental parental rights and fundamental First Amendment, freedom of association rights,” Cover said.
Why the parents sued
The Idaho Medical Freedom Act was lawmakers’ second attempt at removing businesses’ and schools’ ability to require “medical interventions.”
Little vetoed the first attempt because he said it “jeopardizes” the ability of schools to send sick students home. That bill, a polarizing measure that drew hours of testimony in the Legislature, made it through the Senate in a 19-14 vote, short of the two-thirds support needed to override a veto.
Nevertheless, Labrador called on lawmakers to override the veto, in a statement calling the bill the “defining bill of this session.”
Instead, at the very end of the session, the House and Senate each brought new, competing versions. The Senate’s version made it across the finish line and could become a model across the U.S.: ProPublica reported in 2025 that the woman behind the bill, Health Freedom Defense Fund founder Leslie Manookian, and her allies want to make the legislation a nationwide standard.
One of the plaintiffs, Samantha Todd, a physical therapist, worries about her kids being exposed to severe illness at day care. She’s nervous about the risk to her patients, many of whom have health conditions, and her daughter had major surgery as a baby, so Todd wants to make sure her child is kept as healthy as possible after that ordeal, according to her declaration.
Another parent, Leslie Sedlacek, was searching for a day care that required vaccines when she had her child. But she struggled to find one in Boise, and was considering forgoing day care altogether, she said in a declaration to the court. That would have meant alternating work days with her husband, relying on their family or one of the two quitting their job entirely.
A third parent, Jessica Duvall, planned to send her newborn to Le Soleil, but after the 2025 law was passed, said she is keeping her child home until he can receive all his vaccinations. It’s a situation that the lawsuit said hurt her and her husband’s careers and finances.
The new law infringes on their rights to protect their kids, direct their kids’ “upbringing, socialization and education,” and their right to expressive association and the freedom to associate with others who have similar beliefs about public health, the lawsuit argued.
For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the Boy Scouts of America could exclude someone who was gay because of expressive association, according to Oyez, a Supreme Court database.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs cited the Idaho Parental Rights Act, which said that parents have the right to “direct their children’s destiny,” including through education and upbringing.
Idaho code also says no government can violate parents’ rights and if they do restrict such rights it has to be through the “least restrictive means available for the furthering of that compelling government interest.”
The lawsuit pointed to measles risks in young children and said the new law infringed on the rights of public businesses by not letting day cares send home kids.
What did Idaho say?
Right after the law was signed in 2025, a spokesperson for Little, Emily Callihan, told the Idaho Statesman that day cares would still be able to require vaccines under the new law.
In a motion to dismiss, the attorney general’s office rejected the idea that the law bars handwashing or sending sick kids home, which he called “hyperbolic assertions” that were an unreasonable reading of the statute.
Handwashing was a matter of hygiene, the office asserted, and sending someone home because they are sick is different than excluding someone because of refusing a medical intervention.
But “a daycare cannot require an injection (i.e. a vaccine),” according to the attorney general’s memorandum in support of a motion to dismiss the suit.
The memo also argued that the parents didn’t have standing to sue, and that the courtroom wasn’t a proper place to adjudicate the issue. Idaho wants daycares to serve the public, the attorney general’s office wrote, regardless of parents’ medical choices.
“Some people may disagree with that policy choice, but it is rationally related to the State’s desire that all daycares be open to all parents who are seeking such accommodations for their children,” the attorney general’s office wrote. “Policy disagreements about whether daycares should be allowed to be more restrictive in what prerequisites they require belong to the Idaho Legislature, not federal courts — no matter how ‘unscientific’ or ‘illogical’ Plaintiffs perceive the Legislature’s judgment to be.”
The parent’s rights claim doesn’t “extend to the administrative regulation of daycares,” the attorney general’s office said, and the right to associate with similar people doesn’t apply “to a purely commercial transaction.” The state also said it had “sovereign immunity,” for certain claims, which is a doctrine that limits when state or federal governments can be sued. The plaintiffs agreed that some of the claims must be dismissed because of sovereign immunity.
“There is no constitutional right to daycare, and no right to any specific regime of daycare regulation,” the attorney general’s office wrote.
