Idahoans in rural Sandpoint reflect on a year without labor and delivery services

Lauren Sanders could not give birth in her hometown of Sandpoint. With the closure of the local hospitals’ labor and delivery services a year earlier, she had to drive over an hour to Coeur d’Alene to give birth to her son, now 4 months old .

“I was privileged to be able to drive that way for all my appointments and my birth. I was privileged to have the perfect pregnancy with no complications. I’m lucky ’cause that is who the laws of Idaho work for – people with perfect pregnancies,” Sanders said at a rally outside of Bonner General Hospital on Friday. “That is not the case for most people who give birth. Pregnancies are not supposed to be perfect.”

Bonner ended its labor and delivery services last March in response to Idaho’s strict abortion laws. In a news release at the time, Bonner claimed to have stopped this care in part because the state legislature “continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”

Organized by pro-choice activist group The Pro-Voice Project, the rally outside Bonner was meant to highlight the difficulty women in rural North Idaho have receiving care since Idaho implemented its strict abortion ban. Upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the ban criminalizes abortion past six weeks except when the life of the mother is at stake or the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest.

Approximately 200 protesters gathered outside Bonner General Hospital to express their support for its health care workers and disapproval of Idaho’s abortion laws.

“Providers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Providers have standards of care and malpractice guidelines that really dictates how and what care is given. For a provider to be concerned they could be charged with a felony just delays care, makes providers nervous and interferes with appropriate care,” said retired Sandpoint certified nurse midwife Cynthia Dalsing.

The pro-choice protesters were also joined by several dozen counterprotesters who support Idaho’s ban on abortion.

“I obviously completely disagree with abortion, and although I love these people, and I pray that they would come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, the laws in which they’re opposing are needed,” said counterprotester Judah Draxler , adding that he came to the protest to be “a voice for the unborn and the little women who are being murdered daily in our country.”

Protesters at the rally argued these narrow exceptions do not protect women with difficult pregnancies who may need to wait until the brink of death before a lifesaving abortion can be performed.

Sanders is a genetic carrier of a condition causing severe disability. She was scared to receive her care in Idaho, where she would not be allowed to make a hard decision about her own health should something in her pregnancy have gone wrong.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t get transparency from my doctors. Not their fault, but I don’t know if they can fully practice this type of medicine with my best interest because of how the laws are. Can they fully look out for my health, because the rights of the child I was carrying outweighs mine,” she said, while holding her 4-month-old son.

Lifelong Sandpoint resident Makayla Sundquist said she would move out of the state if and when she decides to start a family.

“The laws and the Legislature are preventing people from having families because of the fear that something could go horribly wrong. Not only can you have a loss of pregnancy, which is incredibly sad, but you could potentially lose your life as a pregnant woman in Idaho,” Sundquist said at the rally.

That’s the risk faced by Kayla Smith, who learned at 19 weeks that the fetus she carried had fatal fetal anomalies. She later traveled to Washington to terminate her pregnancy via early induction. She has since become a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of Idaho and several elected leaders who enacted the ban.

“My husband and I found out on our anatomy scan that our son had several fatal fetal anomalies. I didn’t want an abortion – I needed an abortion,” Smith said at a Thursday news conference. “We didn’t want our son to suffer, and the heart condition he had was inoperable. So we were forced to flee Idaho and go to the state of Washington to receive care. These laws are devastating women.”

Smith and her family have since moved to Washington, in part because they fear becoming pregnant again in Idaho. Last week, she was the guest of Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the enactment of Idaho’s ban, the number of abortions in Washington has increased by 23% as of the end of 2022, according to Washington State Department of Health data. The number of out-of-state abortions has risen by 43% in the same time.

Because of the increased demand, Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho is bringing six nurse practitioners from across the country to Eastern Washington.

“The overturn of Roe forced many providers to look at the potential risks now associated with giving care that all people deserve access to. To make sure we’re keeping up with increased demand for care in our state, we’re working with providers that are no longer comfortable practicing in the state they live,” Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho CEO Karl Eastlund said in a statement.

Not just pregnancy

Idaho’s abortion laws and the subsequent exodus of reproductive health care providers have had a great impact on the availability of treatment for women as a whole, according to protesters at the Bonner General Hospital rally.

Lori Getts’ gynecologist moved out of the state as she needed treatment related to symptoms of her menopause. According to Getts, she is “neither for nor against” abortion, but the impact of the current law is affecting the availability of her health care even though her needs “have nothing to do with birth, pregnancy or abortion.”

“Many of the women I know need gynecological care. They don’t need abortions. I really wish women’s health care hadn’t become politicized in the way it has, because I think a lot of health care people in that field are reconsidering whether or not they want to practice in Idaho, especially if they are within their childbearing years themselves.”

According to Dalsing, a retired nurse midwife, women’s health care has become a “very taboo subject” in rural Idaho.

“We’ve lost the providers who do the OB work. But those providers also did the GYN work, too. And so many women will go without their annual exams and that routine care that every woman needs,” she said.

Since giving birth, Sanders has had to continue traveling to Coeur d’Alene for her postpartum appointments because of the lack of care in Sandpoint.

“What we’ve done is made it very difficult for women to access prenatal and postpartum care, because they have to drive a two-hour trip in the car just to have a 15-minute visit. Driving to Coeur d’Alene from Sandpoint can easily take up half a day,” Dalsing said.

For Sanders, these new barriers to access reveal how the abortion debate has “gone beyond pro-choice and pro-life.”

“The impacts of these laws are rippling out to affect every aspect of how women receive health care,” Sanders said.