October 11, 2026
The Oath on My Father’s Wall
By: Julianne Young
My Dad graduated from medical school in 1978. A down-home country boy who grew up roaming the hills around Cove, Oregon, Dad loved life and he loved to serve. For as long as I can remember, a framed copy of the Hippocratic Oath hung on his office wall. It was a solemn promise he never forgot.
After his passing, I stood in his home office and read the oath again, this time through the eyes of a legislator. Most people associate the oath and the white coat with “First, do no harm.” Far fewer realize the classical oath also contains a specific prohibition: the physician will not give a woman a remedy to cause an abortion.
For centuries, the healing profession understood what some in modern politics would rather forget: a pregnant woman’s doctor cares for two patients.
Proposition 1’s campaign leans heavily on doctors as messengers. Idahoans trust physicians, and they should. But a medical degree is not a law degree, and many doctors lending their names to Prop 1 are repeating what they’ve heard about Idaho’s Defense of Life Act, not what it actually says.
Doctors who have done their homework disagree. I recently sat beside three of them at an Idaho Falls forum: Dr. Kim Cox, a Pocatello obstetrician for 35 years; Dr. Matthew Stelzer, a Pocatello pediatrician with years of newborn intensive care experience; and Dr. Joshua Stringham, an Idaho Falls family physician who trains residents to deliver babies. Together they brought more than 70 years and thousands of deliveries into the room.
Their verdict: Idaho’s law is working.
Dr. Cox described a patient who developed life-threatening preeclampsia in three pregnancies, at 20, 24 and 28 weeks. Each time, he acted to protect her life, fully within Idaho law. Today she is home raising two healthy children.
Dr. Stringham put it simply: two patients, two heartbeats. When a mother’s life is in danger, the answer he teaches his residents is delivery, not death.
They are not alone. The oath’s wording has changed over time, but for many physicians, the commitment has not. The Idaho Committee for Hippocratic Medicine, which formally opposes Prop 1, speaks of medicine’s “noble heritage and solemn duty” to honor “the ancient Hippocratic tradition.” Their resolution echoes that oath, declaring: “the solemn duty of all healthcare professionals is to never intentionally harm or kill an innocent human being under their care.”
Nearly 80 Idaho physicians, Drs. Cox and Stelzer among them, have signed an open letter “to correct false claims about Idaho’s abortion laws.” Prop 1, they write, is “extreme, deceptive, and medically unsafe. It does not protect women; it endangers them.”
The facts back them up. No Idaho doctor has been prosecuted for providing life-saving care; no complaints have even been filed. Pregnancy-related deaths have dropped dramatically under the Defense of Life Act. And despite claims of an exodus, Idaho Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses data show active OB-GYN licenses climbing from about 280 in 2022 to roughly 340 by 2024, an increase of about 20 percent.
So what would Prop 1 change?
It would not change care for miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy or early delivery in medical emergencies. That care is legal today.
It would redefine viability based on a baby’s need for “extraordinary medical measures,” a phrase it never defines. Dr. Stelzer notes that many babies born at 30 or 32 weeks need breathing support or IV nutrition, routine care that sends children home to full lives. Under Prop 1’s mandate to read the law in favor of abortion, that care could easily be deemed “extraordinary,” allowing the abortion of healthy babies well into the third trimester.
It would replace Idaho’s physician-only requirement with a vague “health care provider” standard, a change the physicians warn “would put women’s lives at serious risk.”
It would grant new “reproductive freedom rights” to “every person,” with no provision for parents. A minor girl could obtain an abortion without her parents ever knowing.
And it would legalize what Idaho law forbids today: no-questions-asked abortion on demand, including procedures intended to ensure that a baby does not survive.
That is the line my father committed never to cross, and the line these physicians still hold. There is no need to kill a baby who could be delivered and cared for.
Dad’s oath hung where he saw it every day. Idaho’s doctors still live by it. On November 3, Idaho voters can honor it too. Two patients. Two heartbeats. One promise worth keeping.
Vote no on Prop 1.
Julianne Young is a Bingham County Mom who loves faith, family, and freedom; a former state representative; founder of the nonprofit Idaho Family Strong; regional coordinator for Idaho Chooses Life; and 2nd Vice Chair of the Idaho State GOP.
