My LDS Faith Recognizes Exceptions for Mothers’ Lives and Health
By Amy Sorensen
I was born and raised in Idaho. I am the mother of five children, a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a conservative who has spent more than twenty years serving in local Idaho Republican leadership. My faith is exactly why I support the reproductive rights of Idaho families. These are private matters in which politicians only add pain to some of the most devastating trials women face.
Mothers know the particular joy of feeling a baby move for the first time and of contemplating a name before it is ever spoken aloud. I have felt that joy five times. But five pregnancies have also taught me something rarely mentioned in politics: pregnancy can turn, quickly and without warning. A mother's health can devolve rapidly. It would be wonderful if every pregnancy ended with a healthy mother and a healthy baby, but that is simply not real life.
Our own Church's guidance already recognizes this. Handbook policy has long allowed for an exception when a mother's life or health is seriously threatened, or when a pregnancy has no reasonable hope of resulting in a living birth. In those hardest hours, we are taught to counsel with our doctors and to seek confirmation through personal prayer. That is a sacred process. It was never meant to belong to politicians and lawyers.
This is also a limited-government issue, and I have never believed those two convictions were in tension. A government strong enough to override a doctor's judgment in the delivery room is not a government I trust to stay small anywhere else. Idaho's current law gives physicians no clear workable path to act when a mother's health is worsening. It asks them to guess how sick is sick enough, with a prosecutor looking over their shoulder instead of the patient in front of them.
The cost of that fear is already showing up in our hometowns. When a state cannot keep or retain talented doctors, young families do not just lose convenience. They lose the ability to safely bring children into the world. A state that calls itself pro-family cannot keep bleeding out the very doctors who deliver Idaho's babies and limit our ability to make life saving decisions for our own families.
Idaho families deserve a reasonable, common-sense solution to Idaho’s current ban, including real, workable exceptions to defend a mother's life and health, shielding doctors from criminal felony charges while doing their jobs in good faith, and protections to things like IVF and contraception for the families quietly building their homes one prayer and one appointment at a time.
My LDS faith has taught me about agency, about family, and about caring for the one. We can love and protect the unborn and still trust families and their doctors with the most sacred decisions of their lives. We can afford our brothers and sisters the dignity and grace to chart the right course for their own families, without the heavy hand of government.
Amy Sorensen is a lifelong Idahoan, mother of 5, Republican leader, and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
