Protesters march toward the Idaho Capitol carrying anti-abortion signs on April 5, 2023.
Photo: Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The legislation sits at the intersection of many Republican favorite sites of oppression today: the criminalization of pregnancy, extreme attacks on bodily autonomy, and the utter decimation of youth freedom, all under the guise of made up of so-called parental rights.
Idaho’s new law sets another grim precedent by creating an entirely new category of crime: “abortion trafficking.” The law defines “abortion trafficking” as anyone “recruiting, harboring, or transporting a pregnant minor into this state” to obtain an abortion without parental permission. This could mean driving a minor across state lines to get an abortion, but it also criminalizes any adult who helps a minor access abortion medication in the state, such as taking a pregnant teenager to the office of mail to pick up abortion pills ordered online. A person convicted of this new crime could spend up to five years in prison.
Republicans in Idaho were sure to borrow from other states’ cruelest strategies to attack bodily autonomy. Echoing the vigilante abortion ban first introduced in Texas in 2021, Idaho’s new law allows any family member of the fetus or any male who impregnates someone, including rape, to prosecute abortion providers. Lawmakers explicitly agreed to an amendment to remove a preexisting exemption that prevented rapists from pursuing such lawsuits.
Of course, directly banning interstate travel would raise major constitutional issues. But just as the bounty hunter laws were deviously designed to evade challenges in federal courts, the “abortion trafficking” law only criminalizes time spent traveling with a pregnant minor in the state of Idaho, citing a de facto ban on getting an abortion in neighboring states like Oregon, Washington and Montana. Planned Parenthood has already announced that it will challenge the ban in court.
The law puts many thousands of teenage girls at risk of becoming pregnant without parents or legal guardians in immediate danger. Any adults who would help them are now considered criminals. And while Idaho’s extremely strict abortion ban has a technical exception for incest and rape, it only applies if the crime is reported to law enforcement. For a wide variety of reasons, many victims of rape and incest do not report their assaults to the police; this is particularly the case when it comes to child victims, whose aggressors may in fact be their own parents. Thanks to the new law on “abortion trafficking”, it is now a crime to help such a child, impregnated by rape or incest, to end this pregnancy.
Like the GOPs Lewd and eliminationist attacks on trans youth nationwide, Idaho law is designed in the interest of protecting children and the rights of their parents. In practice, these laws specify the republican vision of what the child should be: deprived of autonomy and reduced to the status of parental property, if and only if this parent is considered the appropriate political subject. Parents who support trans children, for example, are considered unfit parental rights holders because Texas policy dictates that they must be investigated as potential child molesters. Meanwhile, the rights of parents who refuse to help their child have an abortion – that is, parents who force a child to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth – are explicitly protected by the new law. from Idaho.
What the bill actually does is ensure that right-wing parents are able to impose the political will of the conservative state on the bodies of their children.
Republican Idaho State Rep. Barbara Ehardt, who sponsored the “abortion trafficking” bill, told reporters it “gives us the tools to prosecute those who would return the right of a parent to be able to make these decisions with his child”.
What the bill actually does is ensure that right-wing parents are able to impose the political will of the conservative state on the bodies of their children. And while it is true that parents who support their child’s right to abortion will be able to do so, if they have the means to organize out-of-state travel, the structural problem is the same: public and communal care of reproductive health and freedom is criminalized.
The insistence on highly selective, white supremacist parental rights is a cynical Republican base-baiting strategy. But it also expresses a deadly serious commitment to the logic of austerity when it comes to scrapping healthcare provisions and crushing the possibility of robust communities of care, in which autonomy and bodily sovereignty – including that of children – are respected. Such insistence on parental rights implies that the only authorized caregiving is privatized within the atomized family and sanctioned by law. And in the name of this family, a great evil is done.