OPINION: Reproductive freedom in Idaho is two years away

Two years from now, Idaho voters will go to the polls and restore the reproductive rights state lawmakers have taken away from them.

Just as they used the initiative and referendum process in the past to repudiate their ideologically sclerotic Legislature on everything from education to health care and tax policy, voters will repeal this draconian abuse of government power over the private medical decisions of Idaho women and their families.

Last week, Idahoans United for Women and Families (iduwf.org/policies) unveiled four prototype initiatives, launching the process that would begin with petition gathering and then ultimately place a measure on the Nov. 3, 2026, election ballot. Among the concepts:

Recognizing rights to contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization.

Restoring the rights of medical doctors to practice medicine when a crisis pregnancy jeopardizes a woman’s health.

Allowing women to make their own health care decisions prior to fetal viability based on best medical judgment or before the 20th or 24th week of pregnancy.

And how do we know we won’t be eating our words on Nov. 4, 2026?

Even when the Legislature began threatening doctors with felony convictions, prison terms, the loss of their licenses and financial retribution for providing an abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, it wasn’t popular.

As a 2022 survey commissioned by Idahoans United for Women and Families found, 59% supported making abortion legal in the Gem State, either almost entirely or with some restrictions.

When it came to imposing criminal penalties on health care providers, 63% were opposed — the same margin that believed “abortion should be between a woman, her family and doctor.”

Elsewhere, 69% agreed that “We all have strong beliefs about abortion, but we should not impose them on others.” And most telling of all, 78% said they would “personally support a woman who had an abortion.”

In the two years since, Idaho’s leaders have given them no reason to change their minds. Instead, the Gem State has responded with some of the harshest anti-abortion rights policies in the United States:

Not only a ban on helping minors cross the border into states where they can legally obtain an abortion, but an attorney general’s guidance that a doctor could be prosecuted for even discussing an adult patient’s option for obtaining a legal abortion in another state.

An attorney general who not only dissuaded state lawmakers from enacting the health exception they promised, but who then went to the U.S. Supreme Court in an brief attempt to undermine federal protections for emergency room physicians who help pregnant women in crisis. He’s still in court trying to achieve that outcome. As a result, women with pregnancy complications have suffered needlessly waiting for care or have been forced to find it in another state. Some have been irreparably harmed.

A Legislature that dragged its heels in providing 12 months of postpartum maternal Medicaid coverage as well as restoring the maternal mortality review process that it allowed to lapse.

An exemption for victims of rape and incest that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Most victims don’t report. But as the Idaho Statesman’s Nicole Blanchard revealed last month, Idaho’s law enforcement agencies aren’t ready to respond if they do. They haven’t come up with a way to readily provide victims with the police reports Idaho’s anti-abortion laws require them to get.

Votes cast by their two U.S. senators, Republicans Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, in opposition to protecting a woman’s right to IVF and contraception.

A platform plank adopted by the Idaho State Republican Party that attacks IVF and also appears to oppose access to hormonal contraceptives, emergency contraceptives and IUDs.

And in the years since abortion became illegal in the Gem State, Idahoans have witnessed:

The loss of 22% of its practicing obstetricians. While some 40 to 60 obstetricians quit practicing, retired or left the Gem State between August and November of 2022, the state recruited only two replacements.

More than half of its maternal fetal medicine specialists went elsewhere.

Staffing shortages were at least partially responsible for the closure of birthing centers in Sandpoint, Emmett and Caldwell.

The number of abortions performed in the U.S. — presumably including Idaho women who have traveled to neighboring states — has increased since Roe was overturned.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Idahoans have witnessed voters in other Republican-dominated states, including Kansas and Ohio, take steps to defend their own reproductive rights through ballot measures. No state has rejected that premise and another eight states — including Montana, Arizona, Nevada and Florida — will decide that question this November.

When the opportunity comes their way, Idahoans will follow suit. About the only thing that could alter that trajectory is an Idaho Legislature that comes to its collective senses and passes more humane, enlightened and compassionate laws.

But this is the Idaho Legislature, after all.

See you 26 months from now. — M.T.