Fetal Heartbeat bill goes to Idaho Senate

The Idaho House passed the Fetal Heartbeat Preborn Child Protection Act Friday, the latest attempt by the Legislature to criminalize abortion.

“We want to save baby lives,” Rep. Steven Harris, R-Meridian, said on the House floor in advocacy of his bill. “When does life begin? It begins at conception.”

House Bill 366 would prohibit abortions in Idaho when fetal heartbeats can be detected, and it would criminalize doctors who perform abortions once heartbeats are discovered. Doctors would be required to seek out fetal heartbeats before performing abortions, and the penalty for the newly proposed crime of criminal abortion would be no less than two years and no more than five years in prison, as well as the suspension and possible revocation of licenses to practice medicine.

The bill has certain rape and incest provisions, both of which are incumbent on reporting those acts to law enforcement.

HB 366 is also a trigger bill: If eventually passed by the Senate and signed into law, it would not take effect unless any federal appeals court rules a similar bill as constitutional. To Rep. Tony Wisniewski, R-Post Falls, that equivocation was one of the many reasons he’s voted against the bill.

“We walk away, and I guarantee you, nothing will change,” the staunch pro-life legislator said. “We will have a good feeling, but that’s all … It’s an all-or-nothing approach, in my opinion. We will not control our 10th Amendment rights to protect our children if we keep sugar-coating this.”

That split struck a wedge among House conservatives, as Wisniewski joined other lawmakers in saying that HB 366 didn’t go far enough to protect the pre-born, and that it doesn’t accurately reflect Idaho’s values.

“If you want to kill your baby, and you want to smoke your marijuana, and you want to do your drugs, go to Oregon,” Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, said before voting against the bill. “Go to California.”

Scott added that the bill doesn’t provide equal protection under the law, as doctors would be prosecuted but mothers who make the decision would not be penalized.

Not all who opposed HB 366 voted against it because they felt it didn’t go far enough. Rep. Chris Mathias, D-Boise, said the provisions that require rape victims to report incidents to the police are unrealistic, at best, and, at worst, mean-spirited attempts to punish the mothers in question.

“Police reports for sexual assault allegations take on average three months to generate,” Mathias said. “Under this bill, those reports, which cannot be released to the public, won’t be available [in the first trimester].”

Rep. Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, added that the bill itself will likely be deemed unconstitutional, continuing a track record that dates back to 1996, the last time the state’s constitutional defense fund paid for a winning case.

“Congratulations,” Rubel told the House. “It’s our 25th anniversary.”

But Harris said, just before passage, that HB 366 is a moral imperative in the legislative body’s quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that essentially gave women the right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restrictions.

“We want to see Roe vs Wade to be overturned,” Harris said. “We’re not waiting for it …”

HB 366 passed on a 53-16 vote and now goes to the Idaho Senate. An earlier version of the same bill already cleared the Senate by a 28-7 vote, but HB 366 has language differences that will require a second Senate vote.