Legislature To Return For Abortion Bill

The Idaho Legislature decided late Friday night to put off final adjournment and return Monday to continue considering a compromise bill requiring minors to get parental consent for an abortion.

House Speaker Michael Simpson said the decision came after the Senate failed in repeated attempts to get two-thirds of its membership to agree to suspend their rules and immediately consider the bill engineered during marathon negotiations between President Pro Tem Jerry Twiggs and Nancy Bloomer of the Idaho Christian Coalition.

Even a simple majority of the 35 senators seemed out of reach.

“I would hope there would be 18 senators here who would see the value of parental consent,” a frustrated Bloomer said while waiting for word on last-ditch talks between House and Senate leaders on whether the 54th Legislature would adjourn or come back to try again.

A six-member committee of House and Senate negotiators, led by Twiggs, agreed Friday evening on a bill aimed at reconciling dramatic differences between sweeping anti-abortion legislation passed by the House and a Senate version without many of the more restrictive provisions.

In the final proposal, Twiggs agreed to compromise his own opposition to restoring any of the extensive physician reporting requirements the Senate had stripped from the measure originally promoted by the conservative Idaho Family Forum. And the Blackfoot Republican endorsed saving a minor’s life as the only acceptable reason for performing an abortion without any consent.

Abortion rights advocates said a law without an exception to the consent requirement when the juvenile’s health - not just life - is at stake would be unconstitutional. Even though his changes would allow a judge to consider health issues when a minor is unable or unwilling to seek parental consent, Twiggs stopped short of saying he believed his compromise would pass constitutional muster.

“It’s not particularly what I believe; it’s what we could arrive at as a compromise,” he said. “I don’t believe the concessions that we made are going to be a big threat.”

But state Sen. Jack Riggs, a Coeur d’Alene physician, said the revised proposal’s new definition of “abortion” could outlaw some birth control devices, including so-called “morning-after” drugs.

Idaho law now defines abortion as “the intentional termination of human pregnancy for purposes other than delivery of a viable birth.”

The new proposal defines it as “use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug or any other substance or device intentionally to terminate the pregnancy of a female known to be pregnant with an intention other than to increase the probability of a live birth, to preserve the life or health of the child after live birth, or to remove a dead fetus.”

House Speaker Michael Simpson, a Blackfoot dentist, defended the change as in keeping with a Pennsylvania law that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled was constitutional. He said the existing law is too broad, and the new language “really tells you what an abortion is.”

That helped convince House and Senate negotiators to endorse the amendments, with the exception of state Sen. Marguerite McLaughlin. The Orofino Democrat was concerned about such dramatic changes to a bill that she believed already had addressed any constitutional problems in Idaho’s abortion laws.

“At least you have a parental consent bill,” said state Rep. Jim Stoicheff, D-Sandpoint. “You’ve got to decide if it’s worth the trade, and in my mind it is.”

The decision capped a full day of behind-the-scenes negotiations on the issue, including an agreement between Twiggs and Simpson to work hard in their respective chambers toward a parental consent compromise and a compromise plan for raising the pay of the governor and other top elected officials.

That was the other major sticking point between lawmakers and adjournment on the 68th day of the 54th Legislature’s second regular session.

The House only reluctantly endorsed the Senate’s pay plan, which would result in the governor’s salary breaking through the six-figure barrier to $101,500 in 2002.

Retiring Gov. Phil Batt’s current salary of $85,000 a year is among the lowest of any state chief executive in the nation, and the House version would have topped out his successor’s pay after four years at $95,668.

Pay for the elected officials cannot be adjusted during their terms of office so the next time a change could take effect would be 2003.