OPINION: Cheers and Jeers: Another year lost in women's health care in Idaho?

JEERS ... to Idaho Gov. Brad Little.

Is he suffering from an overdeveloped case of learned helplessness — or is he simply being disingenuous?

The governor already is throwing in the towel on pursuing a health exception to Idaho’s extreme anti-abortion law.

That’s another year of Idaho women who have to endure prolonged miscarriages, carry fetuses that will not survive and risk permanent injury and/or the loss of fertility unless they can travel to another state for help.

That’s another year of physicians refusing to choose between treating their patients or facing felony convictions, prison sentences and the loss of their professional licenses. As the Idaho Physician Well-Being Action Collaborative reported a year ago, 22% of Idaho’s obstetricians — 51 out of a total of 227 — left the state in the first 15 months the abortion ban was in place. The state was on track to lose at least five of its nine full-time maternal-fetal medicine specialists. The vacancy rate among OB-GYNs has expanded by two or three times.

That’s another year of aggravating Idaho’s maternal health deserts. Half of the state’s 44 counties have no access to any practicing obstetrician at all. Three hospitals — in Sandpoint, Emmett and Caldwell — have closed delivery units, in part because they can’t recruit medical staff.

“If you aren’t sure why doctors are leaving Idaho at this point, it’s because you are not listening to them,” Dr. Amelia Huntsberger wrote in an op-ed a year ago.

So what’s Little’s excuse?

Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador is still waging a legal battle with the Biden Department of Justice over a law that requires emergency room doctors to stabilize patients. Until a final Supreme Court ruling emerges, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act provides a measure of protection to Idaho women seeking emergency room reproductive medical care.

“The legislators that I was involved with during that legislation, for the most part, have said they’re willing to look at it,” Little told the Idaho Press Club legislative preview last week. “But I do think we need to have these legal challenges cleared out to where we know what all the scenarios are; there are different interpretations about what takes place at what time.”

Idaho law conflicts with EMTALA because the state has no health exception. Were Idaho lawmakers to pass one — and Gov. Little signed it into law — the state would be in compliance with EMTALA. The federal lawsuit would disappear.

Who knows why the governor is kicking the can down the road? But Idaho women will suffer because of it.

JEERS ... to Rep. Charlie Shepherd, R-Pollock.

Along with almost a dozen Republican lawmakers, Shepherd is backing a bill that would force any ballot initiative to clear a supermajority — 60% — in order to pass.

That’s modeled after the system in Florida, where a 60% requirement overruled a 57.2% majority in favor of overturning Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy.

Lawmakers typically attack the initiative process when they lose. After voters rebuked years of legislative intransigence by expanding Medicaid coverage to the state’s working poor in 2018, lawmakers retaliated by making it almost impossible to qualify most initiatives for the ballot — a move the Idaho Supreme Court later overturned.

But this time, lawmakers are punishing voters for agreeing with them. Idahoans rejected Proposition 1 — which would have ended the GOP’s closed primary and create ranked-choice balloting in the fall — by 70%.

Talk about sneaky. By passing a bill, Shepherd needs only a majority of House and Senate members plus Gov. Brad Little’s signature. But this is a right under Idaho’s state constitution. Any lawmaker with an ounce of respect for the people would seek an amendment. Of course, that means getting a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate before putting the question to the electorate.

Anything less is displaying utter contempt for the Idaho voters.

JEERS ... to Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard.

Last year, she railed against cannibalism.

This year, she wants to end same-sex marriage.

It’s not just that the rights of same-sex couples have been embedded in the nation’s laws and culture for more than a decade.

It’s not just that Scott is engaging in another of her perennial culture war knife fights.

Or even how reasserting Idaho’s ban on gay marriage would not invalidate any marriage now in effect or those performed in other states.

It’s the ridiculous tactic she’s employing.

Scott is not proposing a new law. She’s not triggering any kind of a lawsuit to prod the Trump-dominated Supreme Court toward overturning the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision in much the same way it reversed Roe v. Wade.

All Scott is doing is proposing a joint memorial, which generates the headlines she obviously craves.

But she’s wasting your time and tax dollars in the process.

After all the committee hearings and all the debate and all the floor votes, what do these memorials accomplish?

They go to Washington, D.C. , never to be seen or heard from again.

When the Lewiston Tribune’s William L. Spence looked into it during a visit to Capitol Hill in 2016, he got a lot of blank stares:

“What do you mean by memorial?” one congressional staffer asked.

“Could you send me an example?” asked another.

Most of the time Spence heard something like, “What are you talking about?”

And you can bet indifference at the congressional level would be magnified by an order of magnitude at the Supreme Court, which answers to legal briefs, not the legislative equivalent of what one veteran lawmaker once described as “hankies in the wind.” — M.T.