Cynics
South Dakota's politicians willing to blight lives of rape and incest victims for a political gamble.

Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

March 9, 2006

SOUTH Dakota has fewer than 800,000 residents. Even so, it's fairly sure that in the next year that population will include adolescents raped by strangers, girls assaulted by male relatives and mentally retarded women for whom giving birth would be disastrous. Two weeks ago, state legislators showed contempt for all these citizens by banning abortion in virtually every circumstance. This week Gov. Mike Rounds signed that contempt into law.

Lawmakers designed the legislation to be challenged, ideally all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which supporters hope will overturn Roe v. Wade. These legislators should ask themselves if their stratagem merits the harm it could inflict.

There's little chance the new law will be enforced until the end of the appeals process. Pro-choice advocates are likely to get an injunction until courts decide on the law's legality. But the bill has already created momentum for grandstanding legislators with little regard for the sad, complex realities legal abortion was meant to address.

Already, 11 other states are considering similar bans. Two states began working on their laws after South Dakota passed its bill. Last week the Mississippi House, which was debating incremental abortion restrictions, abruptly switched gears and passed an all-out ban.

These developments are not what the majority of Americans want. Despite the intensely polarized debate, polls consistently show most Americans support abortion in some cases, and they resist rash decisions about it, by anyone. In January, for example, a poll by CNN, USA Today and Gallup showed that 66 percent of Americans don't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. A CBS poll the same month brought some nuance to those figures, reporting that 27 percent of respondents felt abortion should be permitted in all cases; 33 percent believed it should be permitted in cases of rape, incest and a threat to the mother's life.

South Dakota's politicians ignored the moral seriousness and care with which Americans weigh questions of reproductive rights. Feverish for a Supreme Court showdown, the lawmakers contradicted their own stated beliefs. In a recent essay for USA Today, state Rep. Roger Hunt wrote that South Dakota's bill made no exceptions for rape and incest victims because they had other options for ending unwanted pregnancies. "Because the bill ... only criminalizes the intentional taking of human life," Hunt wrote in USA Today, "conventional emergency contraceptives (for rape or incest) are not prohibited."

His statement is disingenuous. In fact, Hunt and his fellow lawmakers are active in a national movement to undermine access to emergency contraception. This year they defeated a bill providing these contraceptives in emergency rooms, where rape victims could have gotten timely access to them. This year they also passed a bill establishing a legal defense fund for laws restricting abortion and contraception.

Political grandstanding is distasteful anytime. Forced upon people in tragic plights, such as a 12-year-old survivor of incest, it contravenes both good government and human decency.