Unintended health consequences resonate in Idaho | BIDLACK

Back in the 1980s, my three kids were born in military hospitals. The first two entered the world at the base hospital on FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, where I was first stationed as a "finger-on-the-button" ICBM launch officer and then later as an instructor in the same business. I remember particularly when my second child was born, the OB/GYN doctor was one of two such specialists on staff. And because of the stunning rise in malpractice insurance rates in Wyoming at that time, those two doctors represented nearly 100% of the actually available OB/GYN doctors in the state. Other OB/GYNs had either retired or moved away.

As a result, our military doctors ended up performing a number of procedures for expectant mothers from around the state, as otherwise those women would not have received the specialized care they needed. I've argued in the past the Department of Defense is, among other things, the nation's largest social welfare agency, but I'll leave that for another discussion.

I thought of those long ago days as I read the recent Out West Roundup in Colorado Politics.

This week, the article that caught my eye had to do with OB/GYN doctors in Idaho. It reminded me of the long-ago OB/GYN situation in Wyoming I outlined above, and of the effect of unintended consequences.

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As my regular reader (Hi, Jeff!) is currently vacationing in Africa, I'll just have to ask the rest of you to recall my often-mentioned concern with unintended consequences of legislation. Few, if any, new laws function exactly as imagined without any unintended consequences.

Now, Idaho is a very red state, and in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's highly activist decision to overturn Roe (activism isn't about left or right, it's about abandoning decades-old legal precedents and decisions), Idaho, the Gem State (I had to look that up, I didn't know that was Idaho's nickname), saw its legislature pass and then the governor sign a near-total abortion ban in the state that took effect last summer.

The intended consequence, of course, is the complete elimination of abortion in Idaho. The so-called "Defense of Life Act" criminalizes "every person who performs or attempts to perform an abortion," even when the health of the mother is at stake. The only exception under Idaho law is if it is clear the mother will actually die without an abortion. The lawmakers begrudgingly allowed an exception to save a woman's life.

As noted, this is among the most strict of the new batch of abortion laws quickly passed by red states after the Dobbs case was handed down. And how was Roe struck down? Well, I'm sure even my conservative friends are as outraged as I am that the three Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, well, lied when they stated, in so many words, Roe was settled law and they would not actively seek to overturn it. That's dishonest at best, and perjury at the worst, and is certainly grounds for impeachment. But for some reason, I'm thinking the modern Trump-owned GOP doesn't mind this particular breed of hypocrisy.

But I digress…

We've all seen the effect of unintended consequences in our lives. In my own doctoral dissertation, I noted quite a few U.S. military bases, having been locked away from the public for national security reasons for decades, inadvertently turned into ad hoc wildlife refuges where many endangered species are able to flourish. Heck, the giant Vandenburg AFB (now a Space Force Base), at the time I did my research in the mid 1990s, was home to no less than eight highly endangered critters, protected by the security demanded in a cold war. In the medical world, aspirin was created as a pain reliever, but was soon discovered to have the unintended consequence of also serving as an anticoagulant, with a resulting benefit to our health, especially our heart health.

Some unintended impacts are good, as noted in my examples above. But not all are positive. A direct result of the extreme Idaho law appears to be the state is hemorrhaging OB/GYN doctors. In a relatively sparsely populated state, with under 2 million residents, the medical community lost more than 50 obstetricians since the law kicked in last August.

And equally important to the ongoing loss, Idaho only saw two OB/GYNs move into the state since the law took effect. Some doctors retired, some moved and some just stopped practicing obstetrics regarding a variety of concerns. If, for example, a pregnant woman had a crisis and arrived at an Idaho ER while miscarrying, the doctor on duty would need to worry whether, if she did in fact miscarry, the local sheriff would show up and call the act of helping a woman miscarry safely to be "attempting" to perform an abortion? Practicing medicine is difficult enough without the need to always look over one's shoulder, apprehensive about what a local prosecutor might say if a baby is lost.

Ironically, these unintended consequences of the radical right abortion law might result in more death, not less, as women in crisis will be increasingly unable to quickly find the OB/GYN care they need. When religious zealotry, as this bill appears to be, is allowed to become the law of a state, rights are threatened. Idaho will have to live with the consequences of their radically far-right legislature, though I suspect the Republican super majority there will rarely, if ever, stop to think deeply about the unintended consequences of their radical agenda.

And that's a pity.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.