Abortion is not my favorite topic (I posted about LDS abortion policy in a previous W&T post) and I don’t like writing negative posts about the Church. But the recent letter read to LDS congregations in Idaho directing them to oppose Idaho’s Proposition 1, the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, requires some explanation and commentary. There is a good media summary here. There’s a fine post on this over at BCC that you should read as well. Let’s work our way through this, ending up with the pros and cons of the LDS letter.
First, what is the current status of abortion law in Idaho that Prop 1 seeks to modify?
Idaho abortion law is currently governed by Senate Bill 1385 (SB 1385). Passed in 2020, SB 1285 prohibits performing abortions unless necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman or in the case of rape or incest. Under SB 1385, criminal abortion is a felony punishable by two to five years in prison. (from Ballotpedia)
This doesn’t quite convey how extreme the present Idaho law really is. A pregnant woman or minor who has been raped or is a victim of incest cannot just go and get an abortion. They must first make a report to police, then get a copy of the written police report, and then present that report to the medical provider. Many victims, for various reasonable reasons, are quite hesitant to do this. An accurate statement would be: Current Idaho law makes it difficult for even victims of rape or incest to obtain an abortion in Idaho.
The ACLU notes:
Idaho has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, with extremely narrow exceptions. … The extreme and complex nature of Idaho’s abortion laws is linked to a significant loss of healthcare access in the state.
What loss of healthcare access, you might ask? News media reports that roughly 35% of OB/GYN providers have left Idaho (or ceased to practice in Idaho) since 2022. [See this JAMA report for details.] That’s when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision. This, of course, harms all Idaho women who need access to reproductive healthcare, not just those seeking an abortion.
The doctors are leaving practice and leaving the state because of the draconian penalties associated with current Idaho law: two to five years of prison time for violating a vaguely worded statute. Try convincing a jury of twelve conservative Idahoans that your medical opinion that a woman’s life was at risk is sufficiently valid to justify providing an abortion (your defense) when the zealous prosecutor puts up an expert witness or two giving the opposite opinion and calls you a murderer that deserves to go to prison. If the jurors follow the prosecutor’s lead, you go to prison. One wonders why it’s not 65% of providers leaving the state.
How does Prop 1 attempt to change Idaho abortion law?
The Idaho Capitol Sun provides the following text that appears on Idaho ballots in November:
A YES vote would support creating a right to abortion before fetal viability — defined as a fetus’ ability to survive without extraordinary medical measures — and after fetal viability in cases of medical emergency; providing protections against professional discipline and civil and criminal liability for healthcare providers; and codifying a statutory reproductive right to freedom and privacy.
And here is the explanation of a no vote on Prop 1:
A NO vote would support making no change to Idaho’s current law, which preserves the life of preborn children by prohibiting abortion, except when necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman, and during the first trimester in documented cases of rape or incest reported to law enforcement.
That short explanation is incomplete and softens the current law. It makes no mention of the prison time providers potentially face when providing an abortion and no mention of the consequent dramatic reduction in the number of physicians providing abortions in Idaho. It makes no explicit mention of rape and incest victims having to go to the police — and have the police agree with statements of the victim in their written police report — before they can get an abortion. So low-information voters in Idaho may unwittingly read that short NO explanation and think, “Oh, that’s not so bad.”
How did the LDS Church get involved?
The LDS Area Presidency over Idaho sent a letter to all local leaders in Idaho directing them to read the letter in sacrament meetings for the next two weeks. The letter directs members to oppose Prop 1, stating “We … encourage our members to voice their opposition to it in a respectful manner …”. The letter also makes this unequivocal and rather bold statement: “The Church opposes this initiative.”
Idaho state senator Tammy Nichols (who attended BYU-I) posted the letter on X, so it is publicly accessible. A local news organization has confirmed the authenticity of the letter with LDS Church officials, although the report does not identify who specifically they confirmed it with. But there is no First Presidency letter confirming the claim that the Church opposes Prop 1, no press release confirming the statements in the letter, and nothing at all about the Idaho initiative or the letter at the LDS Newsroom or the LDS home page. I would wager a large sum that there will be no mention of it two weeks from now in General Conference either.
Commentary
So now that you have the background for this controversial political issue that the Church has waded into, here are few quick comments. The Church, of course, has the right to take such a position on a political issue (not a candidate) and send a letter to its members. It’s just that in this case it seems like a bad idea to do so.
First, it seems disingenuous for the Church to have such a letter read (twice!) over the pulpit all over the state of Idaho, but not make the text of the written letter available to members in Idaho or provide a statement at LDS.org or the LDS Newsroom that the letter has been sent and what it conveys. They both want to direct members how to vote on Idaho Prop 1 but also not be publicly seen directing members how to vote on Idaho Prop 1. Hint: That won’t work very well.
Second, the letter does not follow LDS procedures for making such statements. The Handbook explicitly states in Section 38: “Only the First Presidency can authorize expressing the Church’s position on moral issues” or “committing the Church to support or oppose specific legislation.” So the direct statement in the letter that “the Church opposes this initiative” does not appear to be properly authorized. Either the Area Presidency went rogue or else senior leadership approved the letter but does not want to publicly acknowledge their approval for the letter. Either way, it raises questions about the validity of letter.
Third, as a practical matter it may be counterproductive for the Church to publicly endorse the initiative and direct members to support it and vote for it. There are a lot of non-LDS voters in Idaho who, hearing the Church intervene so directly against the initiative, will be impelled to vote *for* it. And people outside Idaho who read about the Church’s intervention are likely to think badly of the Church. You think the Church would have learned its lesson after actively participating in Prop 8 in California. Once upon a time the Church knew how to avoid bad PR.
Fourth, getting to the substance of the issue, the Church’s official abortion policy is not as extreme as the current Idaho law that the Area letter endorses by telling members to vote against the initiative. See Handbook Section 38.6.1, “Abortion,” where the exceptions are broader than in the current Idaho law. That section sounds harsh, directing bishops that “A membership council may be necessary if a member submits to, performs, arranges for, pays for, consents to, or encourages an abortion.” But it’s not clear this ever happens. I’m pretty sure that if this was happening, there would be news reports or personal reports on social media of disciplinary actions taken against women or minors who had abortions or family member or doctors who assisted them. I think local leadership now just stays away from any disciplinary actions associated with abortion. I would almost venture to say that the actual policy that bishops and stake presidents apply is to leave abortion decisions to the individual members, regardless of the written policy in the Handbook.
Feel free to respond in the comments, particularly if the letter was read in your congregation. Keep in mind that abortion is a sensitive issue for many people, so keep the comments respectful and focused on the letter and the political issue of Idaho Prop 1.
Update: A similar, almost identical, letter was read over LDS pulpits in Nevada last week, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. Details and a link in my comment well below.
The Mormon opposition to the CA and NV abortion-rights initiatives exposes the profound tension between its shallow rhetoric about individual conscience, religious liberty, and political neutrality and its hypocritical use of institutional authority to shape civil law.
The handbook teaches that abortion is a “grave moral matter” and, importantly, does not treat every abortion as categorically forbidden. Its own policy recognizes circumstances involving rape, incest, serious threats to the mother’s health, and pregnancies involving serious fetal defects. It also says that these decisions should involve prayerful consideration by the people involved.
Yet when voters are asked to establish legal protections for abortion, the Mormon Church moves from teaching its own members to actively urging the public to reject such protections.
That creates an obvious question: if the Church believes these decisions can legitimately involve individual circumstances, prayer, medical judgment, and limited exceptions, why should the civil law be written in a way that substitutes one religious institution’s moral boundaries for the choices of people who do not share its theology?
The contradiction becomes sharper when the Church invokes religious liberty as a principle. Religious liberty means that the government should not impose one faith’s doctrines on everyone else. The Church understandably wants freedom to teach its members that abortion is morally wrong. But there is a meaningful difference between saying, “Our faith teaches our members not to have abortions,” and saying, “The law should prevent people outside our faith from making choices that our doctrine permits only under particular circumstances.”
It is an understatement to categorize the Mormon position as hypocritical—not because its opposition to abortion is inherently illegitimate, but because its political activism appears to sit uneasily beside its own claims about conscience, individual religious freedom, and political neutrality. The issue is not whether the Church has a right to hold a moral position. It plainly does. The issue is whether that right should extend to using the institutional power of a major church to impose that moral position through civil law on people who do not share its beliefs.
I can’t help but reflect how different these laws would be if men were able to bear children and face the litany of health issues, including abuse and incest, that women do.
What’s changed? The church’s policy was written when attitudes about abortion and women’s health were mostly non-partisan. Both the left and the right agreed that fewer abortions were desirable, but that some were always going to be necessary. Abortions are never convenient for women, just less life-destroying than having the child in some cases. The conservative party line in the 1970s is what the church policy says. That’s not enough for MAGA and Project 2025 extremists, and since the church mostly voted in lock-step with those fanatics, the church policy has to be ignored in favor of their *real* view: that women must be controlled and punished, pregnancy is no big deal, and childbirth isn’t really a risk, or if it is, women should be happy to die so their child can live, even if that life is short and painful because God would never do anything like what happens all the time. Red states are going to be states full of incest kids under these new more restrictive laws. It’s just horrible that this total lack of common sense is killing women, and we can clearly see how little our brethren regard the value of our lives. After all, they can just move on to a younger, hotter wife after we are dead.
Sigh. And not a peep about any other “moral” issues like the immigrant, the poor …
FWIW, I think you have a typo in your first paragraph: ” But the recent letter read to LDS congregations in Idaho directing them to support Idaho’s Proposition 1, the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act”
“support” should be “oppose” right?
The church’s own policy is more restrictive than the proposed ballot initiative, yet more permissive than current Idaho law. It seems like a good opportunity to just stay silent, but they decided instead to take the side of the current legal status quo, while pointing to their own more permissive stance to justify it, and showing no evidence that they gave any consideration to the collateral consequences of current law. Is it not also a “significant moral consequence” that member families in Idaho now have a harder time finding doctors to deliver their babies as a result of current law?
This response seems like the same sort of thoughtless cut-and-paste of past policies into new circumstances that gave us the 2015 exclusion policy. The church’s own position on abortion suggests that the moral considerations around abortion involve a difficult balance of competing values, but their response to this political question instead suggests intellectually lazy black-and-white thinking.
I can’t help but believe that in 100 years (which, of course means that none of us will still be living) people then, will look back on our time and view it as a period of great barbarity, overwhelming selfishness, cruelty and soullessness for the way our society (callously) destroyed millions of beings who were in every possible way….Innocent. In other words they were ground up and killed.
I’m all for protecting the life of the Mother (in life threatening situations) – or, in the circumstance of incest or rape. But, murderers we have been….and are to this day.
I take the words of people who want to deny social benefits to the poor and marginalized becausev they take care of their own really, really seriously. Yup.
The previous comment is especially difficult to reconcile with rhetoric about respecting individual conscience. Mormonism can teach that abortion is morally wrong. Its members can passionately advocate for that belief. But there is a profound difference between persuading people through argument and mobilizing institutional religious authority to tell members which side of a ballot initiative to oppose.
And this is where the original comment’s language becomes particularly revealing. It condemns society for supposedly treating innocent human beings as disposable while offering almost no recognition that the people being morally condemned may themselves be confronting extraordinarily difficult questions involving pregnancy, health, rape, fetal abnormalities, family circumstances, poverty, or personal conscience.
If the objective is genuinely to defend human dignity, then dignity cannot consist solely of defending the fetus while treating the pregnant woman as a vessel whose moral agency becomes secondary.
The strongest moral position is not the one that uses the most apocalyptic language. It is the one capable of acknowledging the genuine moral weight on both sides.
You can believe abortion is profoundly wrong without calling everyone who disagrees with you a murderer. You can oppose abortion legislation without pretending that political coercion settles a philosophical question. And you can belong to a church that has deeply held beliefs without surrendering your conscience—or demanding that everyone else surrender theirs.
That is the conversation this comment avoids.
Call it what you want….that is certainly your perogative….but grinding up, sucking out and in a most cavalier way….throwing away a human being (regardless of size) is killing. In a World that justifies this kind of thing…..save me your crocodile tears for “the disenfranchised”.
As for what the LDS Church does (or says) I couldn’t care less…..you go right ahead and use all of your life energy – swinging at whatever windmills you choose.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. As noted above, it’s a sensitive topic. Don’t vent.
Hawkgrrrl, yes I think they put out these policies and then never do a serious rethink about the earlier circumstances or decisions. To the extent senior leaders do come to think about issues differently, they don’t communicate it to local leaders or the membership. We just have to figure things out ourselves most of the time. As noted in the OP, I think a lot of local leaders have done just that with abortion and simply refuse to be the bad guy that earlier leadership wanted them to be and maybe still do (as expressed in the written policy).
Adam F, you are correct I mixed up the direction in that first paragraph. Now corrected.
Quentin, nicely said: “The church’s own position on abortion suggests that the moral considerations around abortion involve a difficult balance of competing values ….” I wish more discussion acknowledged that difficult balance and those competing values. People just pick sides and start arguing.
When the church sends letters about support for an abortion policy, like it has in CA and is now doing in Idaho, I find it very manipulative. Most glaringly is old white men telling women what to do with their bodies. There are many issues, complications, and perspectives that are ignored in the letter. It’s also hypocritical to take this issue on with a letter to be read from the pulpit that can’t be questioned or debated in public. There are also many assumptions the letter is based on, which may not be sound. For instance, virtually all women don’t get pregnant to get an abortion. An abortion is something a man can’t understand, being a woman’s decision about her own body and well-being. Finally, the religious arguments against abortion have been changing over time, including misquoting scriptures and redefining when the spirit enters the body. The Bible does not mention abortion at all, and verses used to justify arguments against abortion are open to many interpretations. As for when the “spirit” enters the body or when a fetus is also an individual life has been rapidly changing over the last 50 years. In colonial times, it was legal, and then states began to restrict it after the “quickening.” The time of “quickening” has changed over time as well, until today, when many say it begins at conception, even though that can’t be supported scripturally or historically. Finally, when the church spends so much energy on this one issue and ignores so many other issues like gun violence, climate change, the extreme wealth gap, and many other topics, it makes me wonder whether prophets speak for a God who is God of the entire earth and its inhabitants or is caught up in the political partisanship of evangelical groups.
I agree that 100 years from now people may look at our time as “a period of great barbarity, overwhelming selfishness, cruelty and soullessness.” There are a lot more issues for people to make judgements about than just abortion. We also haven’t answered the question of whether abortion is more barbaric and cruel, or whether denying women access to have a say in their bodies is.
It’s also hard to accept the church letter when they also seem to be against “birth control” and feeding children breakfast before school. Being more concerned about the unborn than about those who have been born doesn’t look good for the church. When aren’t there letters about healthcare, education, helping those in need, or those who are hungry?
Great article by Colin Nash, who makes very important points in Idaho Statesman:
https://amp.idahostatesman.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article317327029.html
PS: Article is titled:
“My church opposes Idaho Prop 1, but it can and should do more for mothers“
I really can’t tell if grizzerbear55 is talking about the conflict in Iran and the bombing of schools, the dismantling of USAID and the deaths that follow in developing countries, the gutting of US social safety nets and the impacted hungry children, the building of data centers and decreasing access to water and stable energy, or the idolization of guns and the allowance for school shootings. Anyone got a clue?
My understanding is that similar bills have been introduced in both MO and VA. My understanding is that church units in those two states were not required to have a statement read during sacrament meeting. So much for being a worldwide church.
Perhaps Brother Dave B: could author a companion piece (to the above narrative relating to Abortion Rights) titled “The Destruction of the Young of Other Species: a Comparative Analysis of Liberal Passion and Commitment for the Fetuses of Non-Human Offspring – Versus that of Human Beings”; with the subtitle – “Why Some Perceive the Slaying of Human Offspring is of Less Concern – Than All Other (more convenient) Social Causes.”
Chadwick: so you’re formally declaring that the “loss of life everywhere else is tragic, loathsome and deplorable – but, the destruction of the young and innocent (who are not yet proving their worth to Society) is of little consequence – in the larger picture of human experience”……
Abortion numbers have actually gone up since Dobbs. Abortions can now be done through telehealth and mifepristone and misoprostol mailed to your door. The constitutionality of mailing these pills was upheld by SCOTUS in May 2026. Unless the anti-abortion movement can ban mail access and also ban abortions in all 50 states, the current Idaho law doesn’t seem to do too much. Also it is a quick trip to Oregon or Washington where abortion is fully legal.
The Mormon church’s stand on abortion, as noted, is more liberal than many of the opinions in the anti-abortion movement. Many so-called “pro-lifers” want abortion criminalized in cases of rape and incest and demand that women who have to get abortions to save their own lives wait until they are close to death before that happens. I’ll never forget the 10-year rape victim in Ohio who was denied an abortion because she was later than six weeks pregnant (the Ohio law was no abortion after six weeks). She was able to get an abortion in Indiana. But the doctor who performed her abortion was given death threats. I’ll never forget Texas denying an abortion to Tierra Walker who ended up dying from preeclampsia in her 20th week of pregnancy. I feel like the church wants the easy conversations. “Pro-life” vs pro-choice. Against abortion except in rape and incest cases and when health issues are present. They don’t want to have conversation with the radicals who are so heavily embedded in the “pro-life” movement. For you see, the issue is if you want to maintain logical consistency, then how can you allow exceptions with rape and incest? Aren’t those lives too? Shouldn’t we be protecting them as we do all other zygotes, blastocysts, and fetuses, no matter how non-viable outside the female body they are? This is too difficult of a conversation for the church to have, so they take the easy route, point fingers at the liberal boogeyman (which the church calls “the world”), and say that the true path to morality is to hate that boogeyman as hard as you can. Nuance is for suckers.
On grizzerbear’s “pro-life” stance, he said in another thread that we should continue to “bomb away” in Iran.
I’m trying to remember. When the LDS Area Presidency over Minnesota wrote a letter to be read over the pulpit encouraging members to take peaceful civil action to oppose the atrocities committed by ICE in Minneapolis, did they also claim to be speaking for the first presidency? …. oh, wait, nevermind.
Brad D. Yes, I said that – and I stand by it. As long as IRAN is the sworn enemy of the U.S. and is working towards acquiring a nuclear weapon – I want them destroyed. I’m afraid that it’s a matter of future survival (not so much for me) but for my children and grandchildren. Sorry, not Sorry.
I see that you’re basically making the same declaration as Chadwick:
Chadwick: so you’re formally declaring that the “loss of life everywhere else is tragic, loathsome and deplorable – but, the destruction of the young and innocent (who are not yet proving their worth to Society) is of little consequence – in the larger picture of human experience”……
“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism” Carl Gustav Jung
I feel like we’ve had these discussions a million times, but what the hey, here goes. An aborted fetus can’t be the same thing as a viable child for many reasons, but here are a few:
1) you could theoretically abort 9 fetuses in the same time it would take to bring one to term. You could not bring all 9 to term in that same time frame.
2) a fetus before viability is not an independent life form. If separated from the womb it will die. It cannot have the same rights as the life form it is dependent upon.
3) there is no other situation in which we require a human being to make their body available to sustain the life of another. That’s illegal compulsion. Pro-lifers just make an exception for non-viable fetuses.
4) miscarriage is extremely common in nature. 10-20% of pregnancies result in miscarriage. If the products of the pregnancy don’t fully expel from the uterus, the woman’s life is in danger, and they must be medically removed. This procedure is an abortion. States that outlaw abortions are putting a high percentage of women who become pregnant at risk of death. They are literally trying to criminalize miscarriage, which is a tragedy to these expectant parents that is already difficult. Refusing to treat it may result in loss of life or future fertility for the woman.
5) OB-GYNs are fleeing red states with these draconian bans because they can’t afford the liability or possible jail time for treating women’s normal reproductive health issues. Idaho only has a third as many OB-GYNs per person as Chicago, for a quick contrast. Women die when they can’t access reproductive healthcare.
6) Even if an unwanted baby is put up for adoption, there are still grave risks to women’s health in undergoing pregnancy. No men are dying from all the unwanted pregnancies they cause. Just the women are. Maybe that’s what we need to change–punish any men who cause an unwanted pregnancy. We don’t even do a reasonable job at forcing them to pay child support, and men still out-earn women, particularly women whose employment options are reduced with single parenthood.
7) The church’s policy has always previously allowed exceptions for women’s health, fatal fetal abnormalities, and victims of rape and incest. Are you saying you want red states to be full of incest babies, because that’s what these states are creating. Do you think a 10 year old rape victim should be giving birth? Do you think women should have to give birth to their rapists’ children? The church apparently does now because MAGA does. That wasn’t the case in the 70s and 80s.
Wow, destroy Iran because of unrelenting paranoia. Not even seek diplomacy, which has been working. You’re not pro-life. You’re racist.
Am sorry to say that the British member of the Area presidency is a former UK Barrister, apparently specialising in clinical negligence cases (see https://www.no5.com/2018/01/lifting-the-lid-on-love-and-awkward-litigation/), and was formerly employed by No5 Barristers Chambers (as mentioned in the employment section of this article https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders/2024/06/01/elder-karl-d-hirst-general-authority-seventy-2024-bio-england-laywer/).
It feels like it makes this so much worse. Does he really fail to see the implications?
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
A quick update, following a story at the SL Trib (see link below). A similar letter, almost word for word, was read from pulpits in Nevada last Sunday. It was sent to local leaders by a different Area Presidency over the US Southwest Area. This means either they got a copy of the Idaho letter, thought it was a good idea, copied it, and sent it to Nevada local leaders, and did all this in a matter of days.
Alternatively, senior leadership, probably the First Presidency, sent identical directives along with a short draft letter to both Area Presidencies. This seems more likely. Which means the statement in the letters that “The Church opposes this initiative,” might actually have come from the First Presidency, which at least would make it a proper declaration of the Church’s position, even if the FP has not done so publicly.
Only two other states have abortion initiatives on the November ballot, according to Ballotpedia. That would be Missouri (an initiative seeking to roll back abortion rights in that state) and Virginia (with an initiative similar to Idaho’s, but somewhat broader).
The SL Trib story on Nevada:
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/09/22/lds-church-opposes-nevadas/
I always wonder why we don’t discuss the truth that contraceptives are easily accessible through Planned Parenthood and your neighborhood drug store. Why don’t we discuss and encourage responsible sex. Why do we always pretend that women can’t help getting pregnant. Being an adult includes being responsible for your decisions that come with consequences.
Is an inconvenient pregnancy worth killing a human being. Abortion has become an alternative choice instead of birth control.