c. 1996 Religion News Service

EMMETT, Idaho _ A note arrived from the principal’s office as Amanda Smisek, great with child, sat in class this spring at her high school here. The message: A detective at the city police station wanted to speak with her.

“I thought someone must have got into trouble and they were going to question me to see if I knew anything about it,” Smisek says. “So after school I went down there and talked to him, and he asked if I was pregnant.

“I said, `Yeah,’ and he goes, `Who’s the father? Where did it happen?’ I told him and then I left.”

Smisek, 17, says the detective then called in her 16-year-old boyfriend and questioned him, too. A couple of weeks later, both young people received summonses to appear in Gem County Court.

The formal charge: fornication.

The pair joined a handful of other Emmett juveniles recently brought up on charges under a 75-year-old Idaho law banning sex by unmarried people. Virtually forgotten and ignored elsewhere in Idaho, the 1921 statute has been hauled out of mothballs by Gem County authorities appalled at the rise in teen pregnancy.

However, their use of the fornication law has divided this conservative, heavily Mormon community of loggers and ranchers in southwestern Idaho and touched off a debate reaching all the way to the state capital.

“Prosecuting a 17-year-old for fornication, over her mother’s objections, represents the worst kind of government interference in the family,” says Jack Van Valkenburgh, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho. “This prosecution impinges on rights of privacy (and) drives a wedge into the mother-daughter relationship.”

Nonsense, says Douglas Varie, the Gem County prosecutor who is the driving force behind the fornication cases.

“It is absolutely inarguable,” Varie says, “that the state has a compelling interest in preventing the transmission and spread of sexually transmitted diseases as well as preventing teen pregnancies.”

Noting that his fornication cases involve juveniles, Varie declines to discuss specifics or even disclose the number of prosecutions. Others, however, say a small number of fornication cases have been filed.

Nancy Callahan, Gem County public defender, said she thinks that “six to 10 kids” have been prosecuted for fornication.

Smisek’s boyfriend pleaded guilty before Gem County Magistrate Gordon Petrie and received a 30-day suspended jail sentence, three years’ probation and 40 hours of community service.

The case against the young couple might have gone unnoticed if Smisek _ supported by her mother, Jody _ hadn’t decided to fight it and go public. Amanda pleaded not guilty and went to trial, where she was convicted by Petrie.

About 50 noisy demonstrators _ many of them young mothers and pregnant girls _ showed up for her sentencing last month at the courthouse. Smisek, by then nine months pregnant, says the judge lectured her behind closed doors about teen-age pregnancy and its high cost to society.

“He said my case wasn’t about sex,” Smisek says. “He said it was about welfare and how much it cost taxpayers, and then he gave me a sentence like my boyfriend’s, except that I’ve got parenting classes instead of community service.”

Petrie declines to discuss juvenile cases such as Smisek’s, but Varie, the prosecutor, issued a statement defending her prosecution.

“It was never the intention of the prosecutor’s office or the court to punish the juvenile as much as to help her and her unborn child to become productive members of society,” Varie says. “What Amanda Smisek received was a 30-day suspended detention time and three years’ probation,” during which she must finish high school and stay off drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, among other conditions. “That’s it. It’s not much of a story.”

But Smisek’s conviction made headlines all over Idaho, and Varie found himself under fire.

“Yes, teen pregnancy is a problem,” says Jeanette Germain, communications coordinator for Planned Parenthood of Idaho. “But charging a pregnant teen-age girl with fornication is an ineffective means of prevention. We suggest comprehensive education and health services.”

“Bringing kids up on charges is not the way to get a handle on the situation,” says Wendy Brown, managing editor of Emmett’s newspaper, the Messenger Index. “The problem is a family problem and should be dealt with as such. Big Brother should mind his own business.”

And Idaho lawyers, along with the ACLU, questioned the legality of the fornication cases. Not only did they invade family privacy, critics say, but the charges appeared to violate constitutional equal-protection guarantees.

“I know what me and my boyfriend did was wrong, but we didn’t mean for this to happen,” says Smisek, who gave birth May 28 to a healthy boy, named Tyler. “What makes me mad is that if they’re going to charge people with fornication, they should charge it equally _ to adults, too _ and they don’t do that.”

Varie acknowledges that he hasn’t brought such charges against any unmarried adults.

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Smisek and others accuse Varie of bringing fornication charges only against teen-agers who _ like Amanda _ apply for Medicaid benefits covering their childbirth expenses. Varie denies singling out any specific group.

In the Smisek case, Varie says, he was only doing his job after receiving a report of a pregnancy that was “the result of a consensual act between two minors.” Technically, according to Idaho law, the boy involved was guilty of statutory rape, and the girl of fornication.

And Varie points out that he prosecutes boys just as vigorously as girls under the old law.

“The goal is to not only make them (boys) financially responsible for those children, but to encourage and do everything possible to ensure that they have contact with the child,” Varie says. “It’s a sad thing for a child to only know his or her natural father as someone who had a good time with his mother in the back seat of a car.”

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