A federal judge has turned away a lawsuit from a daycare and parents that sought to prevent Idaho officials from enforcing a medical freedom law on daycares.
The challenge to the Idaho Medical Freedom Act was rejected in part because the parents are not being forced to enroll their children in any specific daycare, or any daycare at all, U.S. District Judge Amanda Brailsford wrote in the Sept. 22 decision.
Parents had said that the law unconstitutionally forced their children to “associate with unvaccinated children in their childcare environment.”
Idaho’s governor in 2025 signed the act, which says a business “shall not refuse to provide any service, product, admission to a venue, or transportation to a person because that person has or has not received or used a medical intervention.” An intervention is defined as “a medical procedure, treatment, device, drug, injection, medication, or medical action taken to diagnose, prevent, or cure a disease or alter the health or biological function of a person.”
The parents and Le Soleil, a daycare, sued later in the year and requested that the judge block enforcement with regard to daycares in the state.
“By forbidding daycares from excluding sick and contagious children, the [act] impermissibly infringes on the rights of a private business to operate as it sees fit,” Le Soleil alleged in a filing.
The parents also said that the law violated their fundamental right to parent because they could not choose a daycare that aligned with their values by requiring certain vaccines to attend, and excluding sick children.
Brailsford said the challenge failed in part because legislators passed the law to reduce barriers to obtaining childcare, meeting the standard that a statute has a legitimate governmental purpose and a rational relationship between that purpose and the means chosen to achieve it.
“Prohibiting vaccine mandates as a condition of attendance is a rational means of achieving this objective because it affords parents greater access to the daycare of their choice without regard to the medical decisions they have made for their child,” she said.
Le Soleil, on the other hand, according to the judge, did not show that the state lacked a legitimate reason for enacting the law.
The judge also said that fundamental parenting rights are not implicated by the law because the argument is over parent plaintiffs’ choice of a third-party childcare provider.
“Recognizing such a right would compel the Idaho Legislature, in shaping its regulation of daycares, to accept Parent Plaintiffs’ personal views on vaccinations,” the judge said. “The Court declines to expand the concept of substantive due process to include the right to choose a childcare environment based on a parent’s health preferences.”
Even if the right was fundamental, the law does not appear to restrict it, given how it only regulates daycares, according to the judge.
She threw out the case, granting Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador’s motion to dismiss.
A lawyer representing the plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
“Parents make medical decisions for their children. A daycare does not,” Labrador said in a statement. “The Legislature protected that choice in the Medical Freedom Act, and the court upheld it. Daycares can tell parents what they believe about vaccines and health, but they cannot turn a child away because of a parent’s medical decision. That decision belongs to families, and I’m pleased the court agreed.”