Not long ago, the idea of forcing rape and incest survivors to give birth to their rapists’ children wasn’t a priority for the Republican Party. There was some sort of line of basic human rights that GOP politicians were hesitant to cross, even though they pushed right up to it.
But in recent years, the extreme right has blasted through that line and converted the issue of abortion care into something sinister: the specter of a big-government police state, spying on doctors, patients and even rape victims at the behest of militants who want to define in law their own beliefs at the sacrifice of the First Amendment and separation of church and state. The extreme has been normalized. As a Democratic lawmaker in the deeply Republican state of Idaho, I’ve had a front row seat to this horrifying shift.
What was once beyond the pale became mainstream to Republicans.
As Idaho Republicans have passed restriction after restriction on women’s health care, physicians are scrambling to figure out whether prosecutors will track them down and lock them up in cases of miscarriages and high-risk pregnancies — an Orwellian world coming to fruition.
Two major hospitals have stopped offering labor and delivery services in the past month. We have lost two highly respected OB-GYN specialists, and more physicians are leaving the state because of laws criminalizing medical care. Idaho has become one of the most hostile work environments for physicians in the country, further exacerbating a physician shortage that already was the worst in the country.
This disaster didn’t come about overnight. Ten years ago, a bill that would have required an invasive transvaginal ultrasound before someone could receive abortion care failed after Idahoans flooded committee rooms, outraged. So, the next eight years, Republicans ate around the edges of the protections of Roe. In 2020, though, GOP politicians took a big bite and passed a “trigger law” banning and criminalizing abortion if,…
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