DA ROSA: Prop 1 Is Wrong for Idaho

By Art Da Rosa

Years ago, when I was still a freshman in college, I participated in my first protest. I was 18, and a freshman at BYU-Hawaii. The LDS Church, along with BYU-Hawaii, organized a protest against abortion.

I was quite young then. What I learned, however, was impactful, and the same playbook is being used today in Idaho under Prop 1.

Supporters of Prop 1 try to sell abortion as reproductive freedom and women’s rights. Underneath the fanciful words is a dark game plan that has been forced on America for quite some time: the destruction of families.

Before I begin, I want to credit James Davison Hunter’s book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, and Angelo Codevilla’s The Character of Nations.

Abortion Is About Family

The greatness of America owes a great deal to our support of the institution of the family. A man and a woman get married and form a family. Different roles, but the same goal: to raise a strong family. This collective goal made America strong and worth living for.

Along the way, a culture war was waged. The historical role of men was vilified and diminished. The concept of responsibility and accountability was eroded. With that, sex lost much of its meaning as an act that affirms the relationship between a married couple.

The first front of this culture war was the dissolution of marriage as a binding institution. Today, children raised by their same two married parents from birth to adulthood make up less than half of American kids — look at divorce rates, out-of-wedlock birth rates, welfare policy incentives, and family court practices.

Marriage once carried real legal and social weight — a status that came with responsibilities, not just rights. Otherwise, why would anyone bother? Starting in the late 1960s, states began replacing that with no-fault divorce, which let either spouse dissolve a marriage without showing cause. The stated intent was compassion for genuinely broken marriages. The effect, over decades, was to strip marriage of much of its binding force. With that, the frequency of absent fathers exploded.

In the absence of the proper male figure, government inserted itself to fill the void. Unwed mothers were incentivized to remain single through a range of social programs. And children began to be raised under a different set of rules.

Operating under a growing presumption that natural families are prone to abuse, traditional discipline was recast as something dangerous, subject to government second-guessing rather than left to parents and grandparents. Public education outcomes have declined over the same decades — correlation, not proof, but worth noticing.

The famous Hillary Clinton’s quote, “it takes a village to raise a child,” means that the government decides what is proper to raise a child… and our lives. In practice, the village that shows up is rarely a village at all — it’s a caseworker, a curriculum committee, or a family court judge. What began as language about community support has too often functioned as license for government to substitute its own judgment for a parent’s.

Angelo Codevilla put this plainly: the government, he wrote, has established “a secular priesthood of judges, social workers, psychologists, intellectuals, and artists, all of whom teach a contrary gospel” to the traditional family model — underwritten at public expense.

With all of this, the destruction of family is almost complete. Almost.

Abortion, the Final Piece of a Culture War

The Culture War’s final piece in destroying the family is to allow abortion — to give the absolute right to abortion.

Idaho isn’t voting on a health policy footnote. It’s stepping onto a battlefield that’s been forming for more than thirty years. In 1991, the sociologist James Davison Hunter gave this fight its name — the culture war — and found that America’s real divide no longer runs between denominations but through a single question every faith and every family eventually has to answer: does moral truth come from somewhere fixed and outside us, or does it get rewritten every generation to fit the times? Abortion sits at the exact center of that question because it can’t be answered halfway. Either an unborn child carries a claim on us that no statute can dissolve, or that claim is negotiable, revisable, subject to a majority vote in a legislature or at a ballot box. Prop 1 doesn’t just pick a side in that argument. It writes one side’s answer into Idaho law and forecloses the other.

This is why the fight over Prop 1 will feel outsized to the actual policy language, and why it should. Angelo Codevilla saw this pattern before — he compared the modern American reckoning over abortion to the reckoning over slavery in the 1850s, when the country discovered that some questions can’t be split down the middle because both sides recognize, correctly, that the resolution defines what kind of country this becomes.

Pat Buchanan called it a war “for the soul of America” the year after Hunter named it, and whatever you think of the messenger, he wasn’t wrong about the stakes as people felt them. Idahoans voting on Prop 1 aren’t just deciding how many weeks of pregnancy the law will protect. They’re deciding, in the plainest terms the ballot will ever offer them, which of two Americas they still believe they’re building.

Idaho Laws Already Cover the Narrative Under Prop 1

A primary argument advanced by supporters of Proposition 1 is that sweeping legal change is needed to protect women facing traumatic or life-threatening circumstances. Idaho’s current law already covers more of this ground than the campaign lets on.

• Life of the Mother: Idaho Code § 18-622, the Defense of Life Act, permits abortion when a physician determines, in good-faith medical judgment, that it is necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.
• Rape and Incest: Current law permits abortion in the first trimester in reported cases of rape or incest.
• Non-Abortion Medical Care: Treatment of ectopic or molar pregnancies, miscarriage management, and standard contraception (including birth control pills and IUDs) are explicitly not defined as abortion under Idaho law and remain fully legal.

Proposition 1 does not exist to fill a void for medical emergencies; those protections are already on the books. Instead, Prop 1 uses extreme scenarios to install a broad, statutory mandate that strips away statutory protections for the unborn.

The Psychological Reality

While political campaigns present abortion as an empowering outcome, the data on why women choose it, and how they feel afterward, paint a more complicated picture than “freedom” suggests.

Start with why. When researchers ask women their reasons for choosing abortion, the answers that come back most often aren’t about self-actualization — they’re about circumstances: not being financially prepared, feeling it isn’t the right time, an unstable relationship, or already caring for children who need what’s left of them. That is not a decision made from strength with every option open. It is a decision made inside real constraints — and a law that responds to those constraints only by widening access to abortion, rather than addressing the constraints themselves, has chosen the cheaper form of compassion.

Then there’s what comes after. Even the study most favorable to abortion access, and most frequently cited by abortion-rights advocates — the ANSIRH Turnaway Study — found that in the week after an abortion, regret was reported by 33-41% of women, sadness by 61-68%, and guilt by 55-62%. Those abortion friendly studies do indicate a decline over time, but regret is real and unavoidable.

Some researchers argue the picture is worse. A widely cited 2011 meta-analysis reported a far higher rate of long-term psychiatric harm after abortion.

Far from providing straightforward liberation, abortion often leaves a longer emotional toll than the “freedom” framing admits — and a law that treats the decision as a purely private matter between an individual and a provider has nothing to offer the women for whom that toll doesn’t go away.

If you are interested, here is the exact wording on Proposition 1: https://archive.sos.idaho.gov/elections/initiatives/2026/RFPA.pdf

Conclusion

This November, I will vote NO on Proposition 1. Abortion is harmful. I also want to stand up and voice my support for the sanctity of Family. Prop 1 is not a neutral medical policy, it represents the latest and most consequential move in a decades-long culture war aimed at dismantling the family, bypassing parental authority, and replacing the sanctity of life with state-enforced individual autonomy. Conservative and pro-life Idahoans can clearly see Proposition 1 for what it is—and defend both the family and the unborn. By voting NO in November.

About Art da Rosa

Art da Rosa is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in Idaho and California. He is a former candidate for Jefferson County Commissioner and writes at DAROSA Patriots Corner on Facebook.

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