Extreme abortion bill in Idaho will increase reproductive abuse and coercion
Idaho politicians are at it again with a new attempt to ban abortion in our state. This time, their efforts would have a tragic impact on victims of abuse.
The Idaho Legislature has passed a new bill — Senate Bill 1309 — that would turn family members, colleagues, and even strangers against each other by deputizing people in someone’s life to spy on their personal and private medical decisions. It should go without saying, but this is sick and this is wrong, and Governor Little must veto this bill.
SB 1309 bans most abortions before many people could even know they are pregnant and also brings a list of terrifying implications for victims of domestic violence, reproductive abuse and coercion.
If Governor Little signs SB 1309 into law, it will give abusive partners and family members the tools they need to terrorize someone who is pregnant, tracking their movements and interactions, and letting them file lawsuits against doctors and nurses who provide care to the pregnant person.
It doesn’t take an active imagination to see these consequences coming because this harm is already happening 1,000 miles southeast in Texas.
SB 1309 is uncreatively modeled after Texas’s Senate Bill 8, which has turned neighbor against neighbor across the state while currently being under debate by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the unsettled constitutionality of a law that turns ordinary people into bounty hunters against their community members to sidestep the medical right to abortion, Idaho politicians felt comfortable pursuing their own poorly created version here.
Texas is witnessing an increase in reproductive abuse and coercion because of their bill, and Idaho will face a similar fate if SB 1309 were to pass.
SB 1309 has nearly no protections for Idaho’s survivors of rape and incest.
For example, if this dangerous legislation becomes law, a survivor of rape would face even more danger if they accessed abortion care because they would need to have secured a felony conviction for the person who abused them (and we know in Idaho, only 4% of reported rapes result in a guilty conviction of a sex crime).
What this means in practice: If SB 1309 is signed into law by the governor, rape survivors can be forced to stay pregnant, and if their rapist is a family member, the rapist can even sue the doctor who provides abortion care to their victim. Abortion would become even more stigmatized and, thus, dangerous for people in Idaho despite being a legal and necessary medical procedure for hundreds of people in Idaho every year.
People would be able to control the reproductive choices of their neighbors and family members and could interfere with someone’s pregnancy decisions through lawsuits, stalking and beyond. This is chilling and crooked and would put Idaho in rare company among the country’s most restrictive states for protections of rape survivors seeking medical care and justice.
There is no doubt that this bill would be a disaster for Idaho, especially Idahoans who are already vulnerable to domestic violence and reproductive abuse and coercion.
We strongly urge Governor Little to stop, recognize the dangerous impacts of this bill, and then choose the right thing for our state and the people in it: Veto SB 1309.