Melanie Folwell writes that a post-viability limit is the right choice for a citizens’ initiative in Idaho, but Erika A. Christensen argues that restrictions are never acceptable.
In March, I stood on a porch in northern Idaho and spoke with Nancy, a labor nurse who has delivered hundreds of babies over the years. She signed the petition I was carrying, for the Reproductive Freedom & Privacy Act, because she knows exactly how many things can and do go wrong during a pregnancy. So did Jim in Canyon County, who told me that he was a lifelong conservative who believed Idaho’s abortion ban had gone too far. So did Corey, a military veteran who declared that the politicians needed to mind their own damn business—and whose wife had to be flown to Utah to receive essential care.
By the time the signature drive ended, volunteers with our coalition, Idahoans United for Women & Families, had gathered over 110,000 signatures in every corner of the state, from Boise and Coeur d’Alene to towns most people outside Idaho have never heard of.
I start with our petition because the question posed in this debate can make the topic sound like an abstract line-drawing exercise. It isn’t. In Idaho, we’re not choosing between an ideal policy and a compromised one. We’re choosing between the total ban we have right now, which contains “exceptions” so deliberately narrow as to be unusable, and a standard that protected access to essential care for nearly 50 years.
That distinction matters, and I think it’s gotten lost as people around the country debate the merits of our petition. Our initiative restores the framework that Idaho and much of the country lived under before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion: legal access to abortion before viability (the point in a pregnancy when the fetus may be capable of surviving outside the uterus, typically between 22 and 24 weeks), and after viability when it’s necessary to protect the patient’s life or health or in cases of a fatal fetal diagnosis. (Notably, Idaho is one of only five states with no health exception.)
This is not a new restriction that we invented to win over skeptical voters. It’s the same line set by the Supreme Court that many of us have lived with for our entire lives. We are not asking Idaho to accept a limit; we are asking it to take back a line that a majority of Idahoans still support.
I understand that some advocates want ballot language with no gestational reference point at all, full stop, and they are critical of Idaho’s policy because it includes post-viability limits. But I must strongly disagree.
At the risk of becoming even more of a pariah in national abortion-rights circles, I’d ask these advocates to consider the nuances of voters’ complex personal beliefs around abortion. A majority of Americans, and Idahoans, understandably balk at the notion of no restrictions because of the bad-faith work of anti-abortion activists, who will say and do anything to misrepresent what post-viability access so often actually means: a wanted pregnancy that turned fatal for the fetus or catastrophic for the pregnant woman in the final months.
Nothing in our initiative—or in any serious reproductive-rights initiative on any ballot—permits what anti-abortion activists claim it does. The idea of unrestricted abortion “up to the moment of birth” is not a real policy anywhere in the United States. It is a bad-faith phrase created to be repeated, not examined, and I’d rather focus on what the policy does than on rebutting a ghoulish caricature of it.
Since Dobbs, we’ve ended up with a patchwork of healthcare access, a jumble of unworkable bans, and women from states like Idaho (where we’ve lost 43 percent of our obstetricians since the 2022 ban) enduring hardship and heartache as it becomes increasingly clear that no one is coming to save us.
This is the system we’re organizing within, and I’d argue that’s exactly why the viability line is the right choice for a citizens’ initiative in a state like Idaho—not as a ceiling on our ambitions, but as the reflection of a broad, reasonable coalition united by urgent need.
Our campaign includes physicians and nurses, Catholics and Mormons, college students and retirees, ranchers and suburbanites, young parents and great-grandparents, Republicans and Democrats and independents who agree on very little else. What holds this coalition together isn’t a shared position on the best, most perfect reproductive-healthcare policy. Instead, it’s a shared belief that politicians are always the wrong people to be making these decisions.
That belief is not a lesser version of reproductive freedom. It’s the version that is building consensus among voters, and it’s the standard in 21 states, from red to blue to purple ones. I don’t know what the future of the national movement to restore reproductive rights to every American looks like, and that’s not my job; my responsibility is to the women, doctors, and families suffering needlessly in Idaho. Our future rests in campaigns like this one—rooted in local trust, driven by life-or-death stakes, and honest about what we’re asking for and why.
Ballot initiatives meant to protect reproductive rights should not include restrictions on abortion in the third trimester or at potential fetal “viability.” Either people have the right to make decisions about their lives and bodies without government interference, or they don’t. Whether we call this form of restriction a “limit” or a “ban,” it authorizes government interference in people’s medical decisions. The consequences are delayed or denied medical care, criminalization, and diminished rights for pregnant people.
For all these reasons and more, leading medical organizations and public-health experts reject legal restrictions on abortion, including in the third trimester. Medical professionals know that denying someone timely abortion care at any point in their pregnancy jeopardizes their health and safety, and the exceptions written into any law are insufficient.
