PROP 1: A demolition, not a correction

Every generation likes to believe it has outgrown the cruelties of the ones before it. Then it finds a new name for the old one.

Proposition 1 asks Idaho voters to write into law a right to end an unborn child’s life deep into pregnancy. Its supporters call this health care and privacy. Strip away the language and what remains is the deliberate destruction of a child, sanctioned by the state and paid for in the currency of convenience. Older civilizations did this at altars and gave it a more accurate name. We do it in clinics and refuse to name it at all.

Read the text yourself. Prop 1 claims to restore the standard Idaho lived under before 2022. It does not. It redefines viability as the point at which a fetus has “a significant likelihood of sustained survival outside of the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures” — and then never defines what “extraordinary” means. That judgment falls to the provider performing the abortion. Ask any neonatal nurse in this state how much of what she does every day might be called extraordinary.

I am not indifferent to the hard cases. Idaho’s law should be amended to protect a mother whose pregnancy has turned dangerous to her. But that work belongs in the Legislature, where a bill gets hearings, testimony from doctors, and revision before it becomes law. An initiative is take-it-or-leave-it — a text drafted by a campaign, with no amendment possible and no committee to catch what it leaves undefined.

Prop 1 is not a correction. It is a demolition.

Vote no on Proposition 1.

RON SPOONER

Post Falls