Committee kills family-planning legislation

BOISE – Legislation to expand family planning services – but not abortion – to more low-income Idaho parents was killed in a House committee Tuesday after opponents tried to tie it to everything from abortion to teen sex.

“It’s not unexpected. However, it’s disappointing that there wasn’t more focus on the facts,” said Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, who co-sponsored the bipartisan bill with Rep. Margaret Henbest, D-Boise.

“There was misinformation presented to the committee that somehow minors would be accessing these services, that people would be making lots of money, that this was about abortion – all of which were patently untrue,” Keough said.

SB 1140 had earlier passed the Senate by one vote. It sought to expand Idaho’s Medicaid program to provide health services and family planning to women over age 19 who are coming off the Pregnant Women and Children program, and men and women whose children are on the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Anti-abortion activist David Ripley told the House Health and Welfare Committee that the bill was a way “for the government to get deeper into the sex-facilitation business.”

Dr. David Compton, a Coeur d’Alene obstetrician-gynecologist who supported the bill, said he was shocked to hear of the comments.

“I just don’t get it,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is a bill that would’ve saved the state money, this is a bill that would’ve prevented abortions, and yet the anti-abortion activists are getting up there saying we’re in the sex business?”

Sen. Dick Compton, R-Coeur d’Alene, chairman of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, said after the vote, “I don’t want anyone coming over here and whining about the cost of Medicaid. This could have been one of the best bills this year.”

Backers of the bill, who included a wide array of medical and public health professionals and organizations and all of the state’s public health districts, said it was aimed at helping families plan pregnancies, rather than have unplanned births that are too close together.

“You start having babies every nine months and the chances of that baby being low-birth-weight or premature increases,” said Henbest, a nurse practitioner.

Because Medicaid pays for nearly 40 percent of the births in Idaho, supporters said encouraging parents to avoid unplanned pregnancies would save the state large amounts of money.

The services offered under the bill would have included breast and cervical cancer screenings, contraception, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, blood pressure testing and vasectomies.

A federal waiver program, in which 21 other states already participate, would have paid for 90 percent of the cost.

The federal Pregnant Women and Children program covers women only until one to two months after they give birth, and then the coverage cuts off. Henbest told the committee that in other states, the option for extended care has prompted women to continue seeing the same doctor who delivered their baby, and to plan more carefully for future pregnancies.

Rep. Bill Sali, R-Meridian, said he thought the bill would result in Planned Parenthood of Idaho getting a $15 million windfall in government funding, but Rep. Bob Ring, R-Caldwell, said, “I did the math, and if this waiver went on for another 600 years they might be able to get this amount of money.”

A retired physician, Ring said, “Women who have a baby really prefer to go back to the provider who delivered their baby. This will actually steer patients away from Planned Parenthood. I think this is a marvelous bill.”

Rep. Janice McGeachin, R-Idaho Falls, said she represents “a large constituency that doesn’t even believe that contraception is necessary or correct or even appropriate in their lives, and they have a really difficult time … using their tax dollars to support that.”

She added, “It’s very upsetting to me when our U.S. Supreme Court says we can’t pledge allegiance to our God and we can’t have prayer in our school and we can’t have a Bible in our school, and yet we can have this. … It’s not the proper role of government.”

Rep. Peter Nielsen, R-Mountain Home, said, “I’m a little bit surprised that we had all of the medical field here and they just talk about treating the symptom. We have not gotten down to the cause of the problem. … We are not teaching abstinence like we ought.”

Ring retorted, “Abstinence is not a good alternative for a 20-year-old married woman with a couple of children. It just does not work very well.”

Ring was the only Republican on the committee to join the panel’s three Democrats in voting in favor of the bill, which failed on an 8-4 vote.