(LifeSiteNews) – Pro-abortion activists are gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to legalize abortion-on-demand in Idaho, incensed by state lawmakers’ refusal to appease their demands to weaken the state’s pro-life laws.
Most abortions are illegal throughout pregnancy in Idaho, with a trigger ban starting at conception and civil liability law starting at six weeks. Exceptions are permitted for rape, incest, or when allegedly necessary to save a mother’s life. In January 2023, the Idaho Supreme Court upheld the bans and ruled that the Idaho Constitution does not contain a “right” to abortion.
In response, a group calling itself Idahoans United for Women and Families is circulating a ballot initiative to enact a new statute, the “Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act” (RFPA), that would codify a “right to reproductive freedom and privacy, which is the right to make personal decisions about reproductive health care that directly impact the person’s own body,” expressly including abortion.
In an apparent play for the support of moderates, the initiative allows the state to “regulate” abortion after fetal viability “except in cases of medical emergency” and states that it “does not create a financial obligation on the state, its agencies, or their programs to pay for, fund, or subsidize the reproductive health care protected by this act.”
Regarding the former assurance, however, health exceptions are commonly designed as loopholes meant to authorize abortionists to rationalize any abortion. In Roe v. Wade’s companion ruling Doe v. Bolton, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that “health” had to be understood to mean not only concrete medical complications but factors such as “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.”
If the initiative makes it to the ballot, it would only require a majority vote to be ratified, though reaching that point is a challenge only three other efforts have achieved in the last decade, according to the Idaho Capital Sun.
“To qualify for the ballot, the group needs at least 70,725 qualifying signatures from Idaho registered voters,” the paper explained. “That figure is 6% of Idaho’s nearly 1.2 million registered voters in the 2024 general election — spread across half of the state’s 35 legislative districts.”
Further, while the initiative sidesteps the state legislature or governor’s office, unlike a state constitutional amendment, those bodies would still be able to repeal it even if it does succeed.
Overall, 12 states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
Ballot initiatives have been one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tactics. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since the overturn of Roe v. Wade using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public.
After 2020, pro-lifers either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, Kansas, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box as well as consternation within the Republican Party over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Ten states had such amendments on the ballot in November 2024. Pro-lifers defeated pro-abortion ballot initiatives in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, breaking the abortion lobby’s two-year winning streak, but amendments to embed abortion “rights” in state constitutions prevailed in the remaining states.
