Why the Daughter of Idaho Chooses Life Founder Supports Prop 1

By Whitney Montgomery

There has always been one thing I was sure of in life: I wanted to be a mother. I felt it in my bones for as long as I can remember.

When my husband and I started building our family, we ran into roadblock after roadblock. Over eight years, we went through four rounds of IUI, three egg retrievals and three embryo transfers. IVF is the reason I am a mother. My sons were wanted, prayed for and fought for long before they arrived.

I will always be grateful to the medical team that walked beside us through heartbreak, uncertainty and hope. For me, IVF was never political: it was health care. I believe it is one of the most pro-life decisions a person can make.

That is why I am voting yes on Proposition One. It would protect in Idaho law the right to make private decisions about reproductive health care, including fertility treatment, contraception, miscarriage care and abortion, without government interference.

One of the people leading the fight against it is David Ripley, founder of Idaho Chooses Life and the architect of Idaho's abortion ban. What may surprise people is that David Ripley has a daughter.

Me.

I am his firstborn child and his only daughter. I am 38 years old, and this is the first time I have felt ready to say that publicly. There are people in his closest circles who do not know I exist.

For most of my life, I have watched him build an image as a Christian family-values leader while leaving out the parts of his own story that do not fit that narrative. The man people see at the podium is not the man I knew growing up. By his own public admission, he was a cruel and abusive husband to many of his wives. As a child, I remember  hiding in a bathroom with a phone nearby, ready to call 911 if things got worse. I remember him going to jail over unpaid child support, and claiming that a Barbie at Christmas counted as supporting his child.

I have spent years trying to understand how someone can dedicate his life to "saving babies" while ignoring one of his own. There is something deeply painful about watching your father fight for every cause other than you. It feels as though my dad’s pro-life values end ex utero. 

The more I listen to his interviews, the more this movement sounds like him trying to write his own redemption story. Maybe it is. Maybe he sincerely believes he is making up for his past.

But Idaho women should not have to pay the price for someone else's redemption.

And they are paying for it. Under the ban my father wrote, doctors risk felony charges for providing care, and Idaho has been losing the OB-GYNs that families depend on. Women facing impossible medical decisions are living with the consequences. So are couples who want nothing more than to become parents.

Prop. 1 would write protection for fertility treatment like IVF into Idaho law. My father is working to defeat it. Without reproductive medicine, my sons–his grandsons–would not be here.

That does not feel very pro-life to me.

I am not sharing this to settle a score. I am sharing it because these policies are not abstract. They affect real families at the most private and painful moments of their lives. You do not have to agree with me about everything to believe that those decisions belong to women, their families and their doctors, not to politicians or lobbyists like my father.

So if you are a parent reading this, I hope you will think beyond the slogans. Think about the women you love. Think about the families who needed medical help to bring their children into the world.

Then vote yes on Proposition One on Nov. 3.

Whitney Montgomery is a public school educator who lives in Boise with her husband and two sons.