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Should Ballot Initiatives to Protect Reproductive Rights Restrict Abortion in the Third Trimester?

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........

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