Jill Filipovic on Crazy South Dakota Law

The South Dakota government attempted to outlaw abortion. The South Dakota legislature has HB 1171 declaring the killing of an unborn fetus justifiable homicide. The South Dakota House did not make an exemption for abortion providers.

FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That § 22-16-34 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-34. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is.
Section 2. That § 22-16-35 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-35. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being

Jill Filipovic of Feministe was on television explaining the dangers of this potential law. After the death of Dr. Tiller, lawmakers should be more responsible.

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.