Parents Win Big – Daycares Lose Control

Preschool classroom with colorful furniture and toys — Photo: Beloborod / Shutterstock

A federal judge just told an Idaho daycare it cannot turn away kids whose parents skip vaccines, handing a full legal win to the state’s medical freedom law.

Quick Take

A federal court dismissed a lawsuit from Le Soleil Child Care and three parents challenging Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act.
Attorney General Raúl Labrador says the ruling confirms daycares cannot exclude children over a parent’s private medical choice.
The law, signed by Governor Brad Little in 2025, bars businesses, schools, and daycares from requiring medical treatment as a condition of service.
Idaho already has kindergarten vaccine exemption rates over four times the national average, showing strong local demand for this kind of protection.

What The Court Actually Decided

United States District Judge Amanda Brailsford granted Attorney General Labrador’s motion to dismiss in Le Soleil Child Care v. Labrador. The lawsuit argued the daycare should be free to require vaccines and send home or exclude unvaccinated kids. Reporting on the decision says the challenge failed partly because parents were never forced to enroll their children at that specific daycare in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN_A7hDC2ZY

Labrador framed the outcome in blunt terms after the ruling came down. “Parents make medical decisions for their children. A daycare does not,” he said, adding that a facility “cannot turn a child away because of a parent’s medical decision”. That statement puts the state’s reading of the law in plain English: private businesses don’t get to override a family’s medical choices as a gatekeeping tool for enrollment.

How The Lawsuit Started

The daycare and three Boise-area parents sued after the Medical Freedom Act took effect, arguing it stripped them of the ability to keep their facility vaccinated and safe. Court filings describe their claim that the law effectively bans daycares from requiring shots or even sending home sick kids under certain conditions. The state countered hard, telling the court flatly that “a daycare cannot require an injection,” a position the judge ultimately backed.

That fight traces back to a rockier legislative path than most bills take. Governor Little actually vetoed an earlier version of the Medical Freedom Act in spring 2025, and Labrador publicly pushed lawmakers to override him, calling it “the defining bill of this session”. Lawmakers went back, adjusted the language, and eventually got a version signed into law that covers businesses, schools, and daycares alike.

Where The Disagreement Still Lives

Not everyone reads the statute the same way. One outlet reported that a spokesperson for Governor Little said daycares would still be able to require vaccinations under the new law, a claim that runs opposite to how Labrador’s office describes the court’s ruling. That gap matters because it shows the fight isn’t just legal theory. It’s a real disagreement about what words on a page actually require daycare operators to do.

For parents choosing not to vaccinate, or delaying shots on a different schedule, the ruling removes one more excuse for a business to slam the door. Idaho’s kindergarten vaccine exemption rate already sits above 17 percent, more than four times the national average, according to the Idaho Immunization Coalition. That number tells you plenty about how many Idaho families were already making this exact choice before the courtroom fight even started.

This shows how far pro-freedom people have fallen. Idaho is telling daycare small businesses it can't make its own call about the health of the kids in its care. Daycares are ideal areas where diseases can spread and parents deserve vaccine requirements if they want. https://t.co/XxD4IQb9nn

— Cody Gorman (@GormanforIdaho) September 23, 2026

Conservatives who back parental rights will see this as common sense finally winning in court. A daycare is a business providing childcare, not a substitute for a family doctor or a parent’s own judgment. The idea that a private facility could deny a toddler a spot over a shot schedule always sat uneasily next to the basic American principle that medical decisions belong to families first, government and businesses second.

Critics worried about outbreaks in group childcare settings have a fair point about risk, and that concern isn’t going away just because a judge dismissed one lawsuit. But the ruling doesn’t ban vaccines, doesn’t stop parents from choosing them, and doesn’t force any daycare to enroll a child it never wanted to serve in a different way. It simply says a private medical choice can’t be the price of admission. That’s a narrower, more defensible line than opponents are likely to admit.