Year after year, the Idaho Legislature indulges in sending the same message: With only a handful of exceptions, a pregnant woman should be forced to give birth because her fetus has a right to life.
Of course, a woman's right to choose is the law of the land under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. So lawmakers must content themselves with voting on proxies - bills that at most nibble away at access to abortions or at least offer some kind of symbolic statement.
Lawmakers are engaged in more of the latter than the former this year.
Rep. Ron Nate, R-Rexburg, who teaches economics at the Mormon church-owned Brigham Young University-Idaho, would require abortion clinics to offer their patients a list of ultrasound providers. Passed by a party-line House vote, the bill is political window dressing. Patients would be under no obligation to seek an ultrasound, many of which are operated by anti-abortion rights advocates.
And Idaho Chooses Life Director David Ripley has launched a bill that would prohibit the sale or donation of fetal tissue - a practice that does not
exist within the state.
Either way, it puts them in sync with the religious view that life is sacred.
Until, of course, it comes to the issue of parents who use religion as a shield for child abuse and neglect.
On the books since the early 1970s are laws that state any "parent or guardian who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone shall not for that reason alone be construed to have violated the duty of care to such child."
In other words, there will be no prosecutions and no interference.
Last year, the Governor's Task Force on Children at Risk documented two cases of children who died at the hands of faith healing in 2012. A 2-year-old boy perished of untreated diabetes. Meanwhile, a 15-year-old girl succumbed to untreated food poisoning. The girl's esophagus ruptured from trauma induced by days of vomiting.
Earlier this year, former Ada County Coroner Erwin Sonnenberg told the Twin Falls Times-News' Nathan Brown that he saw other cases of children who died from faith healing. Maybe it's fewer than two cases a year, but when you're talking about illnesses "that can be treated fairly easily ... that's frustrating when you see a kid die."
And in Canyon County, there's a graveyard filled with the children of the Followers of Christ. During a decade's time, 40 of the 130 people buried at the Peaceful Valley Cemetery have been children.
"If children in this cemetery died at the same rate as Idaho children statewide, there would be only four child graves during that decade," wrote Kirtlan G. Naylor, chairman of the governor's task force. "However, based upon the apparent 40 child deaths in that cemetery, there is a child mortality rate of 31 percent, or about 10 times the Idaho pediatric population as a whole."
What would you call that? A religious right to die?
Yet lawmakers seem content to leave Idaho among the six states that tolerate this form of child neglect, abuse and death.
Two years ago, state Rep. John Gannon, D-Boise, ran a bill to reform those laws.
The GOP leadership was not interested and stopped Gannon in his tracks.
Things looked better this year. A month ago, Senate Health and Welfare Committee Chairman Lee Heider, R-Twin Falls, promised Gannon a hearing.
Where's the bill?
Where's the hearing?
Meanwhile, Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter urged Senate President Pro Tem Brent Hill, R-Rexburg, and House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, to convene a "legislative work group" to look into the issue.
A study? More delay? What more do we need to know?
Well, after all, the governor says, we are talking about freedom of religion.
"At what point does that become child neglect or abuse is a question I can't answer," Otter said. "I think everybody cares about the health of children, but we have to understand the No. 1 thing in the First Amendment was freedom of religion."
All of which begs the question:
Where is Rep. Nate?
Or Ripley?
Or even the religious movement that supports them?
Why aren't they out there championing these children's right to life? - M.T.
