OPINION: Abortion ban reflects GOP views toward women

No one should mistake how the Republican Party treats women.

One year ago, Rep. Jack Nelson (R-Jerome) gave his opinion of “the women’s health thing.”

“I've milked a few cows, spent most of my time walking behind lines of cows, so if you want some ideas on repro and the women's health thing, I have some definite opinions."

Later that summer, the Idaho GOP stripped its Women’s Federation of a voting voice on its State Executive Committee.

This past week Sen. Chuck Winder (R-Boise) said that abortion contributes to Idaho’s workforce shortage.

Winder told the Idaho Statesman, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers. There’s a reason, it’s not just the low birth rate. It’s the number of abortions that have occurred.” (https://bit.ly/GOPQuote)

Winder, who speaks for his party, believes women should produce more babies to create more service workers.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” has come to life in Idaho.

We all know women of child bearing age. We all have a wife, a sister, a daughter, or niece. You may even be a woman of child bearing age yourself.

If these women become pregnant they are now at greater risk of morbidity and death than they were just one week ago. Ectopic pregnancies and pulmonary hypertension are only two of a myriad of complicated conditions that require physicians to balance competing priorities: the mother’s life, the baby’s life, and the mother’s future ability to have children again. 

For women, these situations are agonizing and personal — the government needs to stay out. 

Before the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, Idaho’s Republican legislators passed a near total abortion ban. The law would automatically take effect, be “triggered,” if the U.S. Supreme Court ended the right to abortion.

As long as abortion remained legal, it was a convenient cudgel to beat on Democrats, but the trigger law posed only a theoretical threat to women. 

It gave Republicans a false sense of moral superiority.

Then, the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. and Idaho’s trigger ban went into effect. The theoretical threat to women became an immediate and dangerous reality.

Fifty percent of our fetal/maternal physicians left the state. Two Idaho hospitals quit labor and delivery services. Women in a wide section of North Idaho now travel great distances to find care.

Any treating physician is now exposed to criminal liability for performing an abortion.

The American College of Emergency Physicians said that its members “were in an impossible position where they must choose between their patient’s health or their own exposure to liability, which in some states could be criminal charges.” 

Idaho Democratic Chair Rep. Lauren Necochea (D-Boise) said physicians who violate the law, “don’t just get a parking ticket, they go to prison and lose their license.”

Lest anyone claim the ban is not total, consider that it has no health or fetal fatal anomaly exception, and it makes it a crime to transport a minor to another state where abortion is legal. Seventy-three of 117 obstetricians surveyed are considering leaving Idaho because of the ban. (https://bit.ly/IdahoProviderSurvey)

In response, the Biden Administration invoked the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1985.

EMTALA requires doctors and hospitals to treat any person in an emergency, or risk losing federal funding.

Because Idaho’s ban was so extreme, the Justice Department sued Idaho, claiming that obstetric emergencies are just like any other emergency. And therefore the state’s ban violated EMTALA.

A lower court agreed and issued a stay on the ban. Idaho Attorney General Labrador appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This past week, the Supreme Court reversed that stay, allowing the ban to go into effect before even considering the case.

Now, an ER doctor can only treat a pregnant woman’s symptoms, which ordinarily include bleeding, or extremely high blood pressure, or infection. The physician cannot treat the underlying cause of those symptoms, a non-viable pregnancy.

Stabilize the woman until her pregnancy ends itself. Watch and wait.

No woman should have to accept this amount of distress, discomfort and danger.

This is America in the 21st century, not the 18th century. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the U.S. Constitution knows that abortion and women’s rights were not written into it. 

Today, we must recognize that women are not cows who cannot vote, or baby factories who produce low-wage workers. 

Women are fully equal American citizens entitled to make health care decisions for themselves.

Yet, Idaho Republicans persist in thinking women are farm animals. They continue to deprive women of a seat at the table, and they expect them to produce low-wage service workers to relieve the labor shortage.

When will Idaho’s women leave the Republican Party? 

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Evan Koch is chairman of the Kootenai County Democratic Central Committee.