OPINION: Lawmakers failed at one job they had to do

About a year and a half ago, Idaho lawmakers became the dog that caught the car.

In reversing a woman’s constitutional right to control her own reproductive freedom, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Idaho to implement its most extreme anti-abortion ambitions.

But political theory and rhetoric are one thing.

Consequences are something else.

And state lawmakers soon discovered a flaw in their thinking: Without some provision permitting physicians to practice medicine during a crisis pregnancy, Idaho women will suffer. Facing the loss of their medical licenses or even criminal prosecution, doctors will delay providing care — forcing those women with the means and/or the time to seek help in a state where lawmakers and prosecutors don’t second-guess doctors.

Among the victims of this oversight were women who endured prolonged miscarriages, who were carrying fetuses that would not survive and who risked their own health if they did not terminate their pregnancies.

Every time these stories came up, leading Idaho lawmakers acknowledged the need for a new law, protecting doctors who responded in order to protect the health of the woman.

When CNN parachuted into the state, House State Affairs Committee Chairperson Brent Crane, R-Nampa, conceded his colleagues needed to “come back and do more work to define what constitutes a risk to a mother’s life in those highly nuanced situations.”

To ProPublica, Crane said: “Idaho has some work to do. ... Be patient with us.”

And when the Idaho Capital Sun’s Kelcie Moseley-Morris asked him about it, Crane said: “It has been such a long fought, highly emotional, very controversial issue, and people have staked out their positions on both sides that, because there are moral underpinnings to the issue, it feels to some folks that we’re compromising. ... But we’re not going to be able to push this issue away and say we’re not going to deal with it. It has to be dealt with.”

This Legislature has been in session almost two months.

Where’s the bill?

Faced with the inability to deliver quality care without putting themselves in legal jeopardy, Idaho’s doctors are fleeing the Gem State.

When the abortion ban took effect, Idaho supported nine full-time maternal-fetal medicine specialists. Five either have left or planned to by the end of 2023.

A year ago, 48 Idaho physicians practicing maternal health told a survey they were thinking about leaving while 42 said they would remain. Another 27 said they might go elsewhere.

Of those who were contemplating a departure, 73 cited the state’s restrictive abortion laws as the reason.

Last week, the Idaho Physician Well-Being Action Collaborative reported that 22% of Idaho’s obstetricians — 51 out of a total of 227 — have left the state in the 15 months since the state’s abortion ban took effect.

The bulk of those who remain — 85% — work in the seven most populous counties. And half of Idaho’s 44 counties have no access to any practicing obstetrician at all.

Meanwhile, 90% of the country has better maternal mortality outcomes than the Gem State.

“In a time when we should be building our physician workforce to meet the needs of a growing Idaho population and address increasing risks of pregnancy and childbirth, Idaho laws that criminalize the private decisions between doctor and patient have plunged our state into a care crisis that unchecked will affect generations of Idaho families to come,” Dr. Caitlin Gustafson, an OB-GYN and board president of the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare Foundation, told the Idaho Statesman’s Angela Palermo.

In addition to West Bonner General Health at Sandpoint and Valor Health at Emmett, a third Idaho hospital, West Valley Medical Center at Caldwell, will close its Labor and Delivery unit and its neonatal intensive care unit on April 1.

These trends show no sign of slowing.

Where’s the health exemption bill?

Passing a health-of-the-mother exception was the one thing this Legislature had to do.

Instead, it’s gotten bogged down waging culture wars against librarians, whipping up smoke about marijuana, engaging in internal leadership vendettas and deciding whether a fetus should be called a “preborn child.”

All of which raises some questions.

Are lawmakers like Crane forgetting their promises because they’ve been cowed by some outside political influence?

Is it simply a matter that they don’t care?

Or are they satisfied with the way things are? — M.T.