Rep. Ehardt’s anti-abortion bill is trivializing real human trafficking in Idaho | Opinion
Rep. Barbara Ehardt, R-Idaho Falls, has made her legislative reputation by sponsoring controversial, culture-war-focused legislation like the transgender athlete ban. A bill she introduced Tuesday, House Bill 98, is true to that pattern.
The bill absurdly defines helping a pregnant minor obtain an abortion — for example by giving them a ride to a state where it’s legal or by giving them information on how to obtain mifepristone — as human trafficking.
Regardless of your views on abortion, this much is absolutely clear: Enslaving another person to provide sex or labor is not the same thing as providing information about how a minor can order abortion pills or offering them a ride to a clinic.
Not remotely.
This absurdity can be seen clearly in one section of the law, that provides an affirmative defense for parental consent. It would allow someone who helped a minor obtain an abortion to argue that they should not be convicted because “a parent or guardian of the pregnant minor consented to trafficking of the minor.”
Not that the parent wanted to help their daughter obtain an abortion in a state where it’s legal, but that they “consented to trafficking” her.
It’s clear from the drafting of the bill that Ehardt already knows her bill is dishonest in this way. While all other forms of human trafficking carry a sentence of up to 25 years in prison, providing information about where to obtain abortion pills would only carry a two-to-five-year sentence under her bill — the only category of “human trafficking” with its own unique set of lesser penalties.
The decision to paste the crime into the human trafficking section is best understood as legislative trolling — it’s a way to call people who volunteer to help transport someone who wants an abortion a child trafficker using state code. But it is also a slap in the face to victims of actual human trafficking.
One person who was deeply upset by hearing about Ehardt’s bill was Jennifer Zielinski, executive director of the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition and member of the Human Trafficking Sub-Committee of the Idaho Criminal Justice Commission.
She said political stunts like Ehardt’s bill trivialize actual human trafficking.
“It prevents this effort (to end human trafficking) from successfully moving forward, and in Idaho we’re already at least 20 years behind,” Zielinksi said.
The actual human trafficking problem is significant in Idaho. According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 193 cases of human trafficking involving 360 victims have been identified in Idaho since 2007. That almost certainly vastly undercounts the true figure.
But the real problem has been overshadowed by the politicization of human trafficking — from outlandish Q Anon conspiracy theories claiming the Clintons were trafficking children from a pizzeria to claims that teachers are engaged in “grooming” students by teaching sex ed.
Zielinski said the politicization of human trafficking has harmed the effort to fight actual trafficking “tremendously.”
“We’re re-exploiting victims and survivors by creating these outlandish stories and imagery. It takes the true effort off course. And with that image in mind, we fail to correctly identify what human trafficking looks like,” she said.
For example, one persistent real problem is that trafficking victims are prosecuted for things they are forced by their traffickers to do, like provide sex for money or use drugs. That’s due to insufficient training of law enforcement and prosecutors to identify when human trafficking is taking place, Zielinski said.
And resources are few and far between for trafficking victims to escape.
“It’s a very unique victimization,” Zielinski said. “It warrants its own system of care. Right now, we’re piecemealing it together.”
Some of those problems do have a genuine nexus with abortion, but not the one addressed by Ehardt’s bill. Forced abortions — abortions the trafficked person gets without their consent — occur frequently in cases of human trafficking, Zielinski said. So do forced pregnancies, used for the purpose of controlling the victims and survivors of trafficking.
In short, if Ehardt is interested in stopping human trafficking, there’s a lot of work to do. None of that work is getting done in House Bill 98.
“It should be a nonpartisan issue,” Zielinski said. “It’s a human issue. These are people who are used as products, sold for the benefit of a third party.”
It is heartless to use them as political pawns.
This story was originally published February 8, 2023 at 4:00 AM.