The San Francisco Chronicle sees danger afoot to women’s reproductive rights in the tough stance that So. Dakota takes against abortion.

South Dakota, those on both sides of the abortion debate agree, has become one of the hardest states in the country in which to obtain an abortion. One of three states in the country to have only one abortion provider — North Dakota and Mississippi are the others — South Dakota, largely because of a strong anti-abortion lobby, is also becoming a leading national laboratory for testing the limits of state laws restricting abortion, both opponents and advocates of abortion rights say.

In 2005, the South Dakota Legislature passed five laws restricting abortion, after a bill to ban abortion outright had failed by one vote in 2004. And new laws are virtually assured for the coming year. A 17-member abortion task force, made up largely of staunch abortion opponents, issued recommendations to the Legislature this month that included some of the most restrictive requirements for abortion in the country.

The report states that science defines life as beginning at conception and recommends a law that gives fetuses the same protection that children get after birth, thus banning abortion. Until such a ban, the task force recommends requiring that a woman watch an ultrasound of her fetus, that doctors warn women about the psychological and physical dangers of abortion, and that women receive psychological counseling before the abortion, among other measures.

In that last graph, the recommendation of “requiring that a woman watch an ultrasound of her fetus” reminded me of a recent event at a pre-holiday dinner with some of our friends and acquaintances. At the end of the dinner one of the guys pulled out a few small pics of his wife’s ultrasound the previous day. A tiny clearly human form was present, with a perfect little hand held up by its head. They even speculated on whom it looks like, him or her. Everyone around the table was moved, and congratulated them on the upcoming new arrival.

Everyone at the table except for the two of us are pretty staunch liberals, and I’m sure all support the right of a woman to choose whether to let her fetus live or die. I couldn’t help but wonder how someone could make that choice after seeing the living little life, giving that person an image to go along with the movement felt inside her. I also can’t quite conceive of putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger, but that does happen, too.

Bummer of a subject to start up with so soon after Christmas, but there are a lot of children that instead of getting up on Christmas Day to see what Santa has brought, were cut up and flushed down the sink of some horrid abortion clinic, in Kansas, California, New York, Florida, et cetera — you thought that I was writing about Russia I imagine — there too.

Suffer the little children, even those not yet born. (db)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 9:42 am and is filed under Fever Swamp Madness, Medical Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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