Mar 22, 2022Group pushing for boycott of Idaho potatoes over abortion bill
A national activist group is pushing for the boycott of Idaho potatoes if an abortion bill is signed into law by Idaho Gov. Brad Little.
Senate Bill 1309, which has passed in both the Idaho Senate and House of Representatives, would tighten state abortion laws to the point of it being illegal to perform an abortion after detection of a fetal heartbeat. The bill is similar to a Texas law.
The founder and co-president of Freedom From Religious Freedom (FFRF) urged for a boycott of Idaho potatoes through a letter to the editor published by the Idaho Statesman on March 20.
“We’re telling Gov. Brad Little that if he signs into law the Idaho abortion-ban-and-bounty bill, we will boycott Idaho potatoes, Idaho’s top cash crop,” wrote Annie Laurie Gaylor of Madison, Wisconsin. “And we’re asking all who want to protect abortion rights and American values to do the same.
“We can do without Idaho potatoes. But our nation cannot prosper if it treats women with unwanted pregnancies as breeding machines, those who help them as criminals, and seeks to inflict the narrow tenets of a minority of certain religious Americans upon the rest of us.”
According to the group’s website, the FFRF is “the nation’s largest freethought association with more than 30,000 freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and skeptics of any degree.” It is a nonprofit group, based in Wisconsin, with state representatives from 29 states plus Washington, D.C., and Ontario, Canada.
This isn’t the first time a Gaylor-led group has called for a boycott of Idaho potatoes over abortion laws. In 1990, Gaylor, then head of the Women’s Medical Fund, also called for a boycott when a bill passed by the House and Senate was awaiting approval from then-Gov. Cecil Andrus, who eventually vetoed the bill.
