[Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: In South Dakota, at least the pretense is finally over - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  In South Dakota, at least the pretense is finally over

By Ellen Goodman  |  March 10, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

TWO MONTHS AGO, when all eyes were on Samuel Alito's confirmation 
hearings, I traveled 1,300 miles west to Sioux Falls, S.D. I went to see 
the state where the right to abortion had already come down to this: one 
clinic, one day a week, one doctor. The women in the waiting room had 
come from all over the state. The doctor had flown in from Minneapolis.

South Dakota had become a legislative laboratory for abortion 
restrictions. It had followed the blueprint that Alito himself had laid 
out in the 1980s. This was a strategy to add so many restrictions -- one 
law at a time -- that Roe v. Wade would collapse without ever being 
overturned.

As Kate Looby, the head of the state Planned Parenthood, said that day, 
we could end up with a hollow right to abortion that would mean nothing 
to the women of South Dakota.

Now Alito is on the bench and abortion opponents believe, in the words 
of South Dakota state legislator Roger Hunt, ''This is our time." The 
''purists" are in charge now. All the pretense is gone. And the 
laboratory door has closed with a bang. Or, to put it more accurately, a 
ban.

On Monday, Governor Mike Rounds signed a bill that bans all abortions 
except those to protect the life of the woman. No exception for rape. Or 
incest. Or to protect a woman's health.

The purists dropped the old blueprint in favor of a direct, head-on 
battle. The ban passed with the clear, stated intention of overturning 
Roe in a changed Supreme Court. This is a ban so extreme that it 
outflanks the prolife president. It's a confrontation so direct that 
even many in the antiabortion leadership are uneasy with the strategy 
and the timing. Though not, you will note, with the goal.

Nevertheless, is it possible that South Dakota and other states 
following suit have done the country a favor? As Nancy Keenan of NARAL 
Pro-Choice America put it simply: ''They've come out from behind the 
curtain." Forget the political jockeying by prolifers to gain a foothold 
with moderates. Never mind laws on parental notification and consent in 
the name of family involvement. Or attempts to ban one abortion 
procedure at a time. Or laws to mandate misinformation and waiting periods.

Until now the antiabortion right has not only tried to frame itself as 
moderate, it has dressed up in woman-friendly camouflage. It has touted 
research that makes one false claim after another linking abortion with 
depression and breast cancer. It has cast women as the hapless victims 
of abortion and portrayed its own side as protectors.

Even this week, with superb irony, Governor Rounds promised tender care 
for the women he would force to continue their pregnancies. 
Representative Hunt explained that women themselves would not be 
prosecuted under the law because any woman choosing abortion was ''not 
thinking clearly." (Tell that to the US soldier who made a 700-mile 
round trip to the clinic that January day.)

This is what it looks like in front of the curtain. South Dakota's law 
would make felons out of doctors who perform nearly any abortion. The 
government would replace women as moral decision-makers. And it would 
trump doctors as medical decision-makers.

After all, if abortion is legal only when the woman's survival is at 
risk, who makes that decision? If, according to the law, a doctor has to 
''make reasonable medical efforts . . . to preserve both the life of the 
mother and the life of her unborn child," who judges those efforts? A 
cop? A court? One of those activist judges the right so loves to hate?

The ban, slated to go into effect July 1, will be challenged in court 
and possibly by a statewide vote. But hopes of prolife purists are 
clearly pinned on the belief in a Supreme Court majority ready to 
reverse Roe. The hopes of the rest of us are pinned on seeing, really 
seeing, extremists in the spotlights.

''I think the South Dakota issue reflects the divisiveness that 
Americans are tired of," says NARAL's Keenan. Much political chatter 
this year has urged prochoice advocates and politicians to move to the 
right. How many more times are they required to recite the pledge -- 
''We want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare" -- while prolife purists 
fight to make it unsafe and illegal?

On Tuesday, NARAL Pro-Choice America launched a Prevention First Day of 
Action. The press release of the day read optimistically: ''Birth 
Control, Something We Can All Agree On." But the subject of the day was 
the ban and the battle.

Common ground, anyone? South Dakota just put another torch to it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/10/in_south_dakota_at_least_the_pretense_is_finally_over/
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