OPINION: Lawmakers send kids home with bloody knees

Idaho’s physicians are afraid to relieve the suffering of women undergoing crisis pregnancies for fear of violating the state’s abortion ban and going to prison.

Idaho’s librarians are worried about allowing minors to roam freely throughout their bookshelves for fear they might encounter “harmful” materials, triggering costly litigation.

And now Idaho school teachers say they can’t place a Band-Aid on a student’s scraped knee because they’re afraid of being charged with breaking the recently passed Parents’ Rights in Medical Decision-making Act.

Do you detect a pattern?

Call it sloganeering masquerading as policy — or simply invoking the law of unintended consequences. But in giving parents the right to sue a “health care provider” who furnishes a “health care service” to a minor without parental consent, the Legislature has produced this response: The Boise School District has requested parental consent even for the most menial medical services.

As Idaho Education News’ Ryan Suppe reported last week, that list includes:

Band-Aids.

Routine first aid.

Over-the-counter headache remedies.

Mental health check-ins.

In other words, unless a student faces “death or imminent, irreparable physical injury,” or a child’s “life or health would be seriously endangered by further delay,” then Boise school staff members are being told to “please use your best judgment and provide the care as needed.”

Nor is it likely to end there.

Advice coming from the Idaho School Boards Association defines “general first aid” as a medical service covered by the parental rights act.

“While it may not be the legislative intent of the sponsors to require explicit permission to provide a Band-Aid, ISBA guidance is that school districts and charter schools do need to receive permission from parents or guardians to administer general first aid to their student.”

There’s just one gaping problem: Not every child is living with a parent or a legal guardian. Some, for instance, are being raised by grandparents who may or may not be legal guardians. The previous law allowed for “surrogate” decision-makers, such as relatives or those who are close to a minor, to consent to health care in some cases.

“It’s causing a lot of chaos because there are many children in Idaho that don’t have a (biological) or adoptive parent present in their lives, and they don’t have another legal guardian available to consent for their health care,” Caitlin O’Brian, a health care attorney, told the Idaho Statesman’s Ian Max Stevenson.

Nor does it make allowances — as the earlier law did — for minors to be treated for sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, substance abuse or in cases where the child understands the nature of the medical treatment without parental consent.

This comes on top of disclosures from Idaho Reports’ Ruth Brown that the parental rights act stops victims of child abuse from getting a sexual assault exam, or a rape kit, without parental consent. That’s a problem because 93% of child abusers know their victims and 34% of those who abuse children are family members — according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

And now it turns out that teenagers — those older than 14 — have lost the protection of confidentiality the previous law provided to their therapists.

It’s not as if they weren’t warned. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee told the bill’s sponsors, including Majority Leader Kelly Anthon, R-Burley, that their bill wasn’t fully baked. Chief among its flaws was how it failed to take into consideration how many Idaho children do not live in well-functioning traditional families.

But just as they’ve ignored medical professionals who are pleading for a health exception to the state’s abortion ban or refused to listen to librarians and library patrons, lawmakers brushed off the notion that experts might know more about the medical realities facing children and young people than they do.

Instead, they responded with moral indignation and pushed ahead.

Even some common-sense Republicans — those with the courage to stand up for libraries, for instance — toed the line here. Perhaps it was one fight too many in the ongoing battle to purge the GOP of those deemed insufficiently ideologically pure.

But it makes you wonder: What else have these lawmakers got up their sleeves for next year? — M.T.