A rural Idaho hospital will stop delivering babies and providing other obstetrical care, in part due to legal fears from the state’s abortion ban. Bonner General Health currently serves the city of Sandpoint, home to roughly 9,000 people, but beginning mid-May, expecting parents will need to drive at least 45 miles to find a suitable hospital. “We have made every effort to avoid eliminating these services,” Ford Elsaesser, Bonner General Health’s Board president, said in a news release that cited the state’s “political climate.” Alongside legal fears, the hospital has suffered from low staffing and has already been seeing fewer deliveries, recording just 265 births in 2022. The state has some of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion laws, making it so that doctors can face felony charges and lose their medical license if they perform an abortion—even in the case of a life-saving procedure. “For rural patients in particular, delaying medical care until we can say an abortion is necessary to prevent death is dangerous,” Dr. Amelia Huntsberger, a Sandpoint obstetrician, said last year in a court filing supporting efforts to halt the ban. “Patients will suffer pain, complications, and could die if physicians comply with Idaho law as written.” Huntsberger told the Idaho Capitol Sun she plans to leave the hospital and the state over the law.
