South Dakota Rejects Abortion Ban

Tom Croon at Peer Review contends, "There will be no concessions here. The people want conservative leadership, that's what I'm going to give them." The problem with that statement is that even registered Republicans run screaming from true conservatism. Case in point is South Dakota.

Voters in South Dakota yesterday rejected the most sweeping abortion ban proposed in the nation in more than a decade, turning back an effort by the ban’s authors to set up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 United States Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal.

In February, the state legislature voted to outlaw all abortions except in cases where a mother’s life was at stake, but the ban was delayed after its opponents led a petition drive to let voters decide the matter themselves.

South Dakota has been the hardest place, in the country, to get an abortion. Only one abortion clinic, a Planned Parenthood, operates in the state. Yet, when faced with the possibility of a total ban; voters reject it by 55 percent. That's a big number in a Red State that has been strongly anti-abortion. Republicans tried pushing Social Security privatization and Terri Schiavo. Both issues blew up in the Republican's faces. Abortion works to fire up the Christian Right base. However, an all out assault on abortion rights is political suicide for Republicans. The left will win the abortion debate. In the mean time women are put at medical risk for political opportunism. It's sickening and wrong.