Extreme politics in S. Dakota
SOUTH DAKOTA is the latest flashpoint in the battle over abortion -- and what's happening there reveals a lot about the extreme viewpoint of some abortion foes.
The bill the South Dakota Legislature has put before Governor Mike Rounds would outlaw abortion even in cases of rape or incest. The only health exception would be to save a woman's life. Performing an abortion would become a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
Even if the Republican governor signs the bill, something Rounds has suggested he will probably do, it's highly unlikely that the legislation would survive a court challenge. Certainly it wouldn't under previous US Supreme Court rulings.
But antiabortion forces just as clearly hope the legislation will trigger a reconstituted high court to revisit this issue, particularly if President Bush gets to appoint another justice in the time it takes for the matter to wend its way upward.
Regardless of the bill's ultimate fate, however, the ideology behind it is instructive.
In a telephone interview yesterday, I asked South Dakota State Representative Roger Hunt, primary sponsor of the ban, why his legislation didn't include an exemption for women who became pregnant after rape or incest.
Hunt contended that it did: Women could use emergency contraception in the interval between the rape or incestuous sexual encounter and the time that medical tests first confirm a pregnancy, a period he estimated at three to seven days.
But once a woman discovers she is pregnant, Hunt said, the fetus must be protected.
''If there is a rape, it really is an injustice to that woman," he said. ''But there are also remedies for that woman. The perpetrator can be prosecuted. Family, friends, pregnancy-crisis centers are all there to help her, as well as adoption procedures to assist her. But the unborn child whose life is terminated has no remedy."
It doesn't matter to Hunt that such a fetus would be at a very early stage of development. A South Dakota legislative task force has determined that life begins at conception, the Republican state representative explained.
''Whether it is a few days or a few months, you have life," Hunt said. ''If there is life, now we are talking about balancing a woman's right to choose and the life of the unborn child."
Balancing? Hunt and the South Dakota Legislature have made it crystal clear that they put the interests of a fetus at any stage of development over those of a pregnant woman or girl, even if she happens to be a victim of rape or incest.
Nor do any health concerns beyond those ''designed or intended to prevent the death" of the woman matter to them.
''The health exemption is nothing but a wide open barn door to permit all kinds of abortions," Hunt averred. ''We might as well not even pass a bill if we are going to have a broad exemption that is undefined, such as women's health."
Watching this episode, one might ask, what happened to South Dakota?
Actually, the measure ''is not supported by the people of South Dakota and would be considered by the majority . . . in this state to be beyond what they would want to see," contends Kate Looby, Planned Parenthood's South Dakota director.
This specific legislation hasn't been polled, but previous public-opinion surveys suggest that Looby is probably right. In a May 2004 poll for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and KELO-TV, a Sioux Falls station, 34 percent of those surveyed said abortion should be legal, with the decision left to the woman, while another 38 percent said abortion should be available in specific circumstances such as rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Twenty-five percent said abortion should be illegal under any circumstances.
Although this measure is clearly designed to provoke a court test, Hunt says he hopes it will someday take effect in South Dakota.
Now, abortion is a complex, difficult, emotional issue, one that reasonable people can disagree on. Still, it is dismaying that Hunt and his colleagues would compel a woman to continue a pregnancy conceived under terrible circumstances.
It's just as alarming that they make no allowance for a doctor's judgment that carrying a pregnancy to term could injure a woman's health. But these are the burdens some abortion foes would impose on others in the name of their own particular ideology.
Shame.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 