His View: Idaho’s new abortion laws are driving away doctors

By North Idaho standards, Sandpoint is a fairly big, bustling community. Since the 1950s, a lot of babies have been born in its hospital, Bonner General Health, but that long run is coming to an end. Changing demographics — and short-sighted politics — are forcing the hospital to close its obstetrical department.

The number of deliveries at Bonner General has been declining for years, but it’s the ham-handed meddling of politicians in Boise that finally pushed the hospital to cut the cord. Its obstetrical department will close in May.

In a news release earlier this month, hospital administrators pointedly referred to Idaho’s “legal and political climate” as one of the reasons behind the decision. Spoiler alert: Idaho’s new abortion laws are at the bottom of it all.

“Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving,” said the Bonner General news release. “Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult. In addition, the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”

As GOP-controlled states jostle to be the most righteous of them all, Idaho has emerged with some of the most draconian abortion laws in the country. Doctors who break these laws face felony charges, years in prison and suspension or revocation of their medical licenses.

The Idaho Republican Party platform is quite blunt about its position: “Abortion is murder from the moment of fertilization.” Abortion must be off the table, “regardless of the circumstances of conception, including persons conceived in rape and incest.”

You read that right, the party of “limited government” has become the party of forced birth for rape victims and incest victims. Leave it to the wise old men of the Idaho Legislature to know what’s best for rape victims.

Idaho’s far-right politicians can push pregnant women around, but they cannot stop doctors from relocating to states where they won’t be treated as criminals. Replacing them will be a tough sell.

I’ll turn the rest of this column over to Sandpoint obstetrician Deb Owen. In a recent column in the Bonner County Daily Bee, Dr. Owen predicted Idaho’s new abortion laws will have dire and long-lasting consequences.

“I believe that recruitment of new OB-GYN physicians to Idaho will be almost impossible going forward,” Owen wrote. “Idaho now has the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, criminalizing care for women with high-risk, nonviable pregnancies and has no exception for the life or health of the mother under any circumstances except for ectopic pregnancy.

“We aren’t talking about women who want to voluntarily end their pregnancies. We aren’t talking about doctors who want to provide elective abortions. That hasn’t been the case in Idaho for a long time. There was only one clinic in Boise, otherwise, you had to go out of state. But life-saving care for women with pre-viable (too early to be able to survive outside the womb) pregnancies complicated by infection, hemorrhage, ruptured membranes, life-threatening heart disease, stroke, severe pre-eclampsia, impending miscarriage, and lethal fetal anomalies was never illegal or a felony.

“With no hope of a surviving baby, saving the mother’s life and preventing permanent health damage was considered paramount. Now it is a felony.

“And also a basis for civil lawsuits that can be filed by any number of the patient’s relatives. ‘But that isn’t what we meant!’ is the refrain I hear (usually privately) from my friends with more conservative political leanings. But that is what the Legislature enacted into law, and has now been upheld as Constitutional by the Idaho Supreme Court.

“The fallout from this is that OB-GYN physicians are quietly leaving the state. Most physicians don’t go into medicine because they want to have frequent contact with the legal profession. It’s easier to relocate than to live in fear or have to live with yourself when you are forbidden to use your skills and training to save or help a patient with a severely compromised pregnancy.”

Idaho will become a medical desert if politicians continue to criminalize procedures that are the standard of care elsewhere in the civilized world. As physicians depart, patients will have little option but to take two aspirin and make a long-distance call in the morning.

Brock has been a Daily News columnist for more than 20 years. He has lived on the Palouse even longer.