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You Can Hand Out Condoms on This Campus -- Just Not If They're to Prevent Pregnancy
Rolling Stone via Yahoo NewsJust eight miles of rolling Palouse hills separate the college towns of Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington, but for decades they’ve existed as fiefdoms with rival laws. Back in the Eighties, when the drinking age in Idaho was still 18, students from Washington State University in Pullman would cross the state line to get blitzed in Moscow alongside University of Idaho undergrads. A few years ago, a weed shop opened just west of the state line in Washington, where Idaho state troopers are said to idle just beyond the parking lot, waiting to pull customers over the moment they cross into their jurisdiction.
Today, students are crossing the state line in search of reproductive health care and birth control no longer accessible to them in Idaho, says Katie Hettinga, a senior at the University of Idaho. After Roe v. Wade was overturned this summer, abortion became illegal in all but an extremely limited set of circumstances in Idaho, and thanks to a separate law passed by the reactionary state legislature, there is now an earnest debate over whether abortion can even be discussed openly on public college campuses.
On a Friday afternoon in late September, one month into the fall semester, employees at the University of Idaho received an email from the school’s general counsel: seven bullet-pointed pages of legal advice on how to keep from running afoul of Idaho’s abortion laws. The memo outlined a long list of activities that could potentially be considered illegal, and thus were to be avoided, including “promoting abortion” and providing birth control for the purposes of preventing pregnancy. (It was probably still OK, the university’s lawyer wrote, to distribute condoms if their purpose was to prevent STDs.)
And while nothing in any of the laws technically barred employees from directing students to “private groups or agencies of another state” — a reference, some believed, to the Planned Parenthood in Pullman — the email advised employees that they ”must remain neutral on the subject of abortion” in virtually any circumstance in which it might come up, or else risk criminal prosecution, fines, jail time, and a lifetime ban on state employment. “Academic freedom,” the letter warned, “is not a defense to violation of law.”
Today, students are crossing the state line in search of reproductive health care and birth control no longer accessible to them in Idaho, says Katie Hettinga, a senior at the University of Idaho. After Roe v. Wade was overturned this summer, abortion became illegal in all but an extremely limited set of circumstances in Idaho, and thanks to a separate law passed by the reactionary state legislature, there is now an earnest debate over whether abortion can even be discussed openly on public college campuses.
On a Friday afternoon in late September, one month into the fall semester, employees at the University of Idaho received an email from the school’s general counsel: seven bullet-pointed pages of legal advice on how to keep from running afoul of Idaho’s abortion laws. The memo outlined a long list of activities that could potentially be considered illegal, and thus were to be avoided, including “promoting abortion” and providing birth control for the purposes of preventing pregnancy. (It was probably still OK, the university’s lawyer wrote, to distribute condoms if their purpose was to prevent STDs.)
And while nothing in any of the laws technically barred employees from directing students to “private groups or agencies of another state” — a reference, some believed, to the Planned Parenthood in Pullman — the email advised employees that they ”must remain neutral on the subject of abortion” in virtually any circumstance in which it might come up, or else risk criminal prosecution, fines, jail time, and a lifetime ban on state employment. “Academic freedom,” the letter warned, “is not a defense to violation of law.”
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