After a handful of religious men (and one woman, Amy Coney Barrett) stripped women of the 49-year-old right to decide what to do with their own bodies, it was clear: If you were a woman, your body was no longer your own.

Ironically, in Idaho where I live, the abortion controversy is making it harder for women to have the babies they want. This year the Idaho Legislature defunded research into preventing maternal deaths, and the state also chose not to extend its postpartum Medicaid coverage.

Then in March, the only hospital in the northern Idaho city of Sandpoint announced it would no longer provide obstetrical services. Patients must now drive 46 miles for labor and delivery care. Why? Physicians were leaving the state, the hospital board explained, and recruiting replacements would be “extraordinarily difficult.” 

The board also cited the Idaho Legislature, which had passed bills to criminalize physicians for doing nothing more than providing nationally recognized “standards of care.”

In Idaho, once evidence of a heartbeat is detected in a fetus, abortion is illegal — except in documented instances of rape, incest or to save the mother’s life. A doctor I interviewed told me about a patient in her late second trimester of pregnancy. The fetus was severely malformed and would not survive, she said, and “standard of care” called for aborting this fetus. But Idaho law meant it had to die inside the mother.

Idaho legislators also say that bringing a minor across state lines for an abortion is “trafficking.” The hysteria continues with a new law that allows family members and the father of an aborted fetus to file civil lawsuits against doctors.

There’s also the legal push in courtrooms to bar mifepristone pills that induce safe early abortions. This spring, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth Prelogar sent an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to block lower court rulings that had banned the drug.

She noted that the abortion pills have a safety record of more than 20 years, and no federal judge had ever overruled the FDA’s judgment about the safety of a drug. In April, the high court ruled that access to mifepristone may continue while litigants seek to overturn FDA approval.

Another drug used along with mifepristone, misoprostol, has many uses in reproductive health. It’s on the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines. Yet this year, Wyoming banned the use of any medication, including misoprostol, that could be used for abortions.

Days before the law was to take effect, Teton County Judge Melissa Owens blocked it, pending the outcome of a lawsuit. The litigants are also suing to stop Wyoming’s near-total abortion ban, enacted in March. Judge Owens suspended that ban as well and combined the two lawsuits.

Federal law, which requires doctors to treat patients in emergency situations, trumps state law. But a federal investigation reported by the Associated Press, found that two hospitals — Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri, and University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City — violated federal law when they refused to provide an emergency abortion to a pregnant woman who was experiencing premature labor.

Doctors said the fetus would not survive and her health was at serious risk, yet they would not abort the fetus because a heartbeat was detected.

But when you look at the ballot box, abortion has fared well, especially in California, Vermont and Michigan, where voters added the right to abortion to their constitutions. A pro-choice judicial candidate won in a landslide in Wisconsin, and the states of Kansas, Kentucky and, most recently, Ohio, saw voters reject measures that could have led to bans.

Then this July 13, the FDA approved Opill, the first daily oral contraceptive available for use in the United States without a prescription. If that option had been available to me as a teen in the 1970s, I would not have had to sneak off for an abortion at age 16.

One thing’s for sure: if men got pregnant, none of this would be happening.

Crista Worthy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation in the West. She writes in Idaho.

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The decline occurred year by year while we spent $18 billion on what’s politely called “mitigation.” That meant building fish passages around dams without fish ladders or snatching fish from warming rivers and trucking them around dams before they died. Nothing has ever worked.

The truth is that some dams must be removed if salmon are to have a prayer of leaving the ocean and swimming up rivers to spawn.

Now, finally, there is a sign of hope for the fish even as Snake River salmon in the states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington remain close to extinction.

There’s hope because the Biden administration has been in settlement talks with legal plaintiffs the state of Oregon, the Nez Perce tribe, and sporting, fishing and environmental groups. They have sued the federal government five times over its failed attempts to save salmon under the Endangered Species Act, and each time the government has lost.

Meanwhile, spring chinook, sockeye and steelhead trended toward extinction in the Snake River watershed, which includes their best remaining habitat in the lower 48 states.

In 1997, my newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, wrote a series of editorials calling for breaching the four lower Snake dams in Washington to restore salmon abundance. The editorials urged paying for the impacts on dam removal on power supply, grain transportation and irrigation as a more effective and cheaper fix than continuing failed policies. The federal government chose to spend $18 billion on those failed policies.

But now, the Biden administration and others recognize that restoring our rivers is an issue of tribal justice as well as the only real solution. For far too long, say biologists Rick Williams of Idaho and Jim Lichatowich of Oregon, we have treated salmon as an industrial commodity. Our reliance on hatcheries while we continue to fragment and destroy habitat has been at the root of the fish’s struggles.

But if we remove the chief obstacles that block the fish from their cool, high elevation-habitat, the biologists say, these wild, adaptable fish will recover themselves. “Because of our long reliance on substitute nature, we’ve almost lost faith in salmon to reproduce itself in quality habitat,” Williams says.

It has taken decades, but much of the public has come to understand the folly of our industrial fixes for salmon. In the May Republican primary, U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson won reelection by a landslide after introducing a plan to breach the four dams to save salmon and make impacted communities whole. His losing opponent opposed breaching the dams.

More significant, Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who has long resisted any salmon recovery plan that included removing the four dams, joined with Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee in endorsing a study of how to replace the services provided by the dams. 

The study showed that breaching the four dams was the most promising approach to salmon recovery, though it would require spending from $10.3 billion to $27.2 billion to replace the electricity from the dams’ hydropower, plus grain shipping and irrigation.

Murray is the most powerful Northwestern senator in Congress. But she will need the rest of the Democratic delegation to join her if she is going to turn the tide.

Most of all, Washington Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell and Oregon Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio will need to join Murray, Simpson, Oregon Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer, and outgoing Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, if legislation is going to pass this year.

The resilience of the wild Snake salmon and the quality of the high-elevation spawning habitat has led biologists to predict the fish will reverse the 40-year extinction trend if the four dams are removed. This might just be the year that rivers and salmon are set free, ending the salmon wars. Here’s hoping.

Rocky Barker is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a retired reporter who lives in Idaho and is the author of Saving All the Parts: Reconciling Economics and the Endangered Species Act.

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In the indigo hour when night becomes morning, dozens of people — most from Mexico — queue for the van that will shuttle them to the picking fields. For the next 15 hours, they harvest. Ladders teeter on the uneven, parched earth. Cherries are quickly pulled from high branches by the handful. 

The fruit isn’t for them. Like most regions in the country whose economies rely on exporting food, little of what’s picked here makes it onto the plates of the people who harvested it.  

At the end of the daylight hours, a company bus returns and drives the farmworkers to the Walmart, on the far side of town, where they can shop for groceries and gloves. Farmworkers forced to shop late at night have frequently been met with depleted shelves ever since the early days of the pandemic. They buy what little they can, then re-board the van that brings them home. Many fall asleep hungry.  

In 2020, when the pandemic began, organizer Samantha Guerrero drove across the low, parched hills of Idaho’s Canyon County to a neighborhood she calls Farmway Village. First built as a labor camp, the low-income housing complex has become home to many of the county’s agricultural employees. Guerrero had planned to distribute information about the new virus. But what she found wasn’t a lack of information; it was a lack of good groceries. She’s been working to change that ever since. 

For immigrant farmworkers, food is in short supply: “The only thing close to that place is a gas station,” Guerrero told me. “That means they only have access to the processed foods sold there.” 

Guerrero works for the nonprofit Idaho Organization of Resource Councils, which is trying to change things. Recently, it started distributing culturally relevant foods, like masa for corn tortillas, and some local, organic farmers let volunteers glean produce like tomatoes and pumpkins to redistribute.  

Yet the need is widespread — in Idaho and elsewhere where farmworkers are needed — and even the best-organized mutual aid projects can’t meet the demand. Nonprofits try to help, but they aren’t equipped to make the systems-level changes needed to end the lack of nutritious food and the hunger suffered by farmworkers and other immigrants. 

Local food pantries try, but they’re not always an answer. Many farmworkers come from agricultural communities south of our border with Mexico, Guerrero says. They’re used to fresh fruits, home-raised meats, or hand-pressed tortillas. Even though these immigrant communities are the primary audience for many food pantries, the canned and boxed food they provide can be unrecognizable to the people they serve.  

This holds true across the West. I’ve spoken to other farmworkers and organizers in Montana, Oregon, and the Dakotas, and all echo those sentiments. We haven’t diminished the hunger of the workers who feed us. 

There are 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States. For more than 20 years, migration from Mexico has been largely driven by economic hardship that began in 1994, when the NAFTA treaty crashed the value of the peso. Now, migrants from that country and Central America are increasingly coming north to escape drug violence, or when landslides, hurricanes, and other disasters hastened by the changing climate force them to flee.  

When many workers land at large, corporate-owned farms, they sometimes find harsh conditions; this February, for example, the U.S. Department of Labor found that one large Idaho farm had shortchanged its 69 workers by $159,000. 

Ninety-one percent of counties with the highest rates of overall food insecurity are rural, and workers there face soaring costs of food and a declining number of grocery stores, as consolidation and rising real estate values close outlets. Although farmworkers harvest fruit and vegetables all day, it is odd, but true, that they are living in “food deserts.” 

“I have to say,” Guerrero says, sighing, “that there is a lot of abundance (in Idaho). There is enough to go around. It’s just all going elsewhere.” 

Astra Lincoln is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to lively debate about Western issues. She writes in Oregon.

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Those willing to take risks that seem reckless to others include Lauren Boebert, the always-armed owner of Shooter’s Grill in Rifle, Colorado, who served patrons despite Gov. Jared Polis’s order, and Doug and Christine Lohman, owners of Hardware Brewery in Kendrick, Idaho, who made a big deal of opening May 1, also against a governor’s order.

Kendrick, population 307, is where Doug and Christine Lohman poured their life’s savings into a pub fashioned out of a former hardware store. The bar depends almost entirely on customers from somewhere else, like the University of Idaho, 30 miles away, or Lewiston, about 60 miles away.  Their Hardware Brewery would be recognized in most towns as a pleasant local Cheers, except it’s not in anybody’s neighborhood.  

Under a plan published by Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little, the pub could have reopened as a restaurant May 16 and as a bar June 13.  It likely would also have received $10,000 from a small business relief fund created by Little with federal dollars. Instead, the Lohman’s said they had to open early or go bankrupt. Feeling that they’re “as safe as McDonalds,” the couple invited some Very Important People to their opening.

Janice McGeachin, the Republican lieutenant governor, traveled 500 miles from Idaho Falls to attend.  She said she’d been incensed from the start that only establishments providing food, medical care, public protection or construction were deemed “essential.”  All businesses are essential, the lieutenant governor said, including pubs —such as the one she also operates — and should be open as a constitutional right of assembly.    

With her was Raul Labrador, the chairman of the Idaho Republican Party and a recent member of Congress who lost a close primary election to Little in 2018, plus two state legislators from Lewiston.  Labrador wanted the state open in April.

All opposed the governor from the first, as did the speaker of the Idaho House, many other legislators and numerous sheriffs and county commissioners — opponents similar in other Western states. 

You have to hand it to Little, who has negotiated the pandemic with patience and skill.  New cases are trending downward, crushing the curve at least for now, and testing is expanding rapidly.  A recent poll by the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry found nearly 80 percent of Idahoans support the governor’s four-stage reopening plan, with even higher support among Republicans.   

Like other small states, Idaho received $1.2 billion in federal funds, among the highest amounts per-capita nationally, on top of payroll protection and enhanced unemployment insurance.  Little is using $300 million for grants of up to $10,000 each to small businesses like Hardware Brewing and most recently, to day care centers.

With the minimum wage an abysmal $7.25 an hour, Idaho wages are so low unemployment payments can be more attractive than working.  For few months at least, about half of the 100,000 unemployed Idahoans have caught a rare break in life.

Notably, protestors chose not to stage their rebellion in nearby Nez Perce County where 20 of its 95 infected county residents have died, or at a meat packing plant south of Boise where 23 workers have been sent home after testing positive.

The “open now” leaders have championed near-absolute freedom versus what they label as government oppression.    Little has cast his decisions in soft language, advising residents to shelter in place “as best you can” or saying of the Kendrick protesters, “they certainly aren’t making this any easier.” 

Recently, however, he suggested that those who open bars or hair salons prematurely “could lose their operating licenses.” But the governor took no action as six businesses opened early in Idaho Falls. In Colorado, Shooter’s Grill was handed a cease and desist order — no ambiguity there.

When this all began, we might have assumed it would only last a few months. Instead, it could turn out to be like World War I, an epic slog which ended with vastly more people dying from flu than combat. This pandemic likewise requires wartime-like unity, good will and clear thinking.

Meanwhile, caution makes more sense than showboating and anger. 

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In the state capitol of Boise, population 225,000, where I live, signs of a positive response to fighting the Corvid-19 pandemic are everywhere, with American flags flying on some streets to show this is a time for patriotism.

After Gov. Brad Little stepped up on March 25 to close non-essential businesses and order Idahoans to “stay at home as best you can,” helping-out initiatives have been so numerous in Boise that our two local newspapers (yes, we have two!) can’t document them all. Consider just one: Residents began sewing protective masks well before the recent recommendation by the Center for Disease Control.

Boise’s mask-making campaign enlisted 1,300 participants in 13 days, and one woman alone cuts out 800 cloth masks a day for others to add strings. The initiative expects to provide 10,000 masks to clinics, hospitals and retirement homes.

In Idaho Falls, population 62,000, a group called the Sewing Sisters is filling a request for 4,000 masks from nursing homes and other care centers. The 200-person Idaho Falls Chinese Community raised $9,500 to buy masks from around the world for hospitals.

Under Little’s order, construction continues full-tilt in this fast-growing state. The hospitality industry has slowed to a crawl, though we still can buy takeout cocktails at local bars. yet enough of us are working from home that it appears the governor’s order has been mostly followed, at least in southern Idaho.

In more rural, northern Idaho, where about a quarter of Idahoans live, it’s a different world.

Mary Sousa, a state legislator from Coeur d’Alene, told the Idaho Statesman that not a single constituent has spoken to her in support of the governor’s order.

Tim Remington, another Coeur d’Alene legislator and a pastor, defied the governor’s order by holding in-person church services. In nearby Bonner County, Sheriff Daryl Wheeler not only supports mass church services, but, in a letter to the governor declared it was also “unconstitutional” for him to prohibit healthy people from going to work.

Not surprisingly, Ammon Bundy, the rancher who organized the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge four years ago, defied the governor by holding a rally in Emmett, Idaho, on Easter Sunday for about 100 people. He said people needed to challenge government orders that infringed on constitutional rights: “We want to be with each other,” We thrive on that. It’s part of our life. It’s part of liberty,” reported the New York Times.

Moreover, Northern Idaho is the center of what’s called the Redoubt Movement. This movement of well-armed survivalists imagines a future in which adherents from eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, along with partisans from western Montana and western Wyoming, will join with Idaho in self-defense when

society inevitably disintegrates. During this pandemic, Redoubt advocates have purchased ever more arms and ammo, saying they need to be prepared to fight outsiders coming for their food and land.

Meanwhile, this year’s session of the Idaho Legislature appropriated $2 million for virus testing but otherwise paid little attention to the pandemic. It did, however, prevent transgender persons from changing their sex on a birth certificate, authorize concealed carry of weapons for non-residents, and came close to defunding public television. At issue was the children’s cartoon Clifford the Dog, which apparently offended because the dog visited a lesbian couple. North Idaho’s extremists have many friends in the state Legislature.

Yet here in Boise there is a “school’s out” quality to these radiant spring days, though hard times lie ahead: This is a state that ranks near the bottom in most categories of education and social wellbeing, and where about a third are renters living paycheck to paycheck — and now without paychecks.

Recovery will be largely dependent on the federal government, and that will be a bitter pill to swallow for the disaffected government-haters of this state. Like it or not, we are all in this together, and most of us want to help each other, not run away or stockpile more guns.

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