Yesterday it was announced that the South Dakota Senate passed a bill 23 to 12 in favor of banning abortion in nearly all cases. Today, the House voted to approve the same bill 50 to 18 and Gov. Mike Rounds plans to sign the bill into law and it would go into effect July 1.
From AP:
Under the legislation, doctors in South Dakota would face up to five years in prison for performing an abortion unless it was necessary to save the woman’s life.
…
Opponents of the bill argued that abortion should at least be allowed in cases involving rape, incest and a threat to a women’s health.If a woman who is raped becomes pregnant, the rapist would have the same rights to the child as the mother, said Krista Heeren-Graber, executive director of the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault.
“The idea the rapist could be in the child’s life … makes the woman very, very fearful. Sometimes they need to have choice,” Heeren-Graber said.
There is only one clinic performing abortions in all of South Dakota, Planned Parenthood, and they have pledged to challenge the law if Gov. Rounds signs it into law.
Will this case reach the SCOTUS before or after the eighty-five year old Justice Stevens retires?
Before or after the 2006 elections?
Ideologically inconsistent these legislators, considering SD has a death penalty and 4 white men sitting on death row.
Moral tripe to inflict punishment on a doctor who gives medical treatment to a woman, on the one hand, when the other hand pays an executioner and provides that person benefits and a pension, no doubt, for killing.
73 Hypocrites — the new legislative label in SD.
On a hopeful note, my boss is 87 and is sharp as a tack and still going strong.
I am so disgusted with this. For years, I escorted women into our local clinics for pregnancy counseling and abortion services. To see all that I worked so hard for slowly crumble under lack of access and now direct assault is horrific.
Bless your heart for doing all that work. My god you must have been a huge comfort to those women. That means the world to a woman who’s going through a difficult time and then having to confront angry or overly pious people to boot.
At the end of the Ed Schultz show today, a caller brought up an interesting question: if life begins at conception, when does citizenship begin?
Think about it. It struck me as something potentially very big.
I think he was suggesting a way to get at this issue from another angle in the courts. Not being a lawyer, I’ve no idea if it could work. Anyone else?