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SOUTH DAKOTA LEGISLATURE WANTS TO DECLARE OPEN SEASON ON DOCTORS

Posted by: Bridgette P. LaVictoire on February 15, 2011.

02/15/11-by L.S. Carbonell
Legislators are supposed to represent the people who elected them. They haven’t figured that out in South Dakota. Twice, in 2006 and 2008, South Dakota voters rejected bills to ban abortion outright. Their representatives-who-don’t-represent have been trying to end-run around those votes ever since.

Their latest effort involves House Bill 1171, which was supposed to tighten the definition of “justifiable homicide.” Instead, it would make it legal for a spouse, partner, parent or child of a woman seeking an abortion to murder the doctor, nurses or anyone else they perceived to be potentially harming the fetus. Eight doctors have already been murdered by anti-abortion fanatics, 17 have escaped murder attempts.

South Dakota is already the place where it’s damned near impossible to get an abortion. There are no providers inside the state and Planned Parenthood has to fly a doctor in to a clinic in Souix Falls. Women have to drive as much as six hours and stay overnight for their procedures because South Dakota law requires a propaganda-laced “education” session followed by a twenty-four hour chance to change their minds. Those types of law are based on the ridiculous idea that a woman seeking an abortion is making a spur-of-the-moment decision because she was too lazy in her promiscuity to use birth control. They are the consequence of forty years of obscenely twisted representations of the kind of women who seek abortions and the reasons they do so. Parts of the South Dakota propaganda script were overturned by a Federal judge in August 2009, who found them “untruthful and misleading.” The state has appealed the decision.

Now, State Representative Phil Jensen, who obviously is incapable of ever becoming pregnant, wants to make it legal for anyone who can claim any relationship to a pregnant women who has made her own decision about her own body, whose own life might be at risk if the pregnancy isn’t terminated, who may be the victim of rape or incest, to legally walk into that Souix Falls clinic and open fire. This probably explains why conservatives are so opposed to banning mega-clips and automatic weapons. It would reduce the number of doctors, nurses and bystanders that could be killed at one time to save the “life” of a few dozen cells.

I repeat – it is absolutely essential that we stop dodging the issue here. We need to fight anti-abortion laws and anti-gay laws as a religious freedom issue, not a civil rights issue or a privacy issue. We need to stop being afraid of the elephant in the examining room and address the root cause of these repressive laws and oppressive policies. We are being denied our Constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom from state-imposed religion by a minority who are demanding that we live under the rules of their churches and their religions. It is not persecution of them. We do not want them to be denied their right of free worship. We want them to stop denying us our rights not to bow down to their gods and their holy books.

And we need to make it clear that we are not baby killers just because we support a woman’s right to decide her own fate. Most of us would never have an abortion ourselves. Most of us would do anything we could to support a woman or girl facing an unintended or unwanted pregnancy. We are not the heartless sons-of-bitches who threw a pregnant seventh-grade classmate of my daughter out on the street in Tampa. That was her Christian parents who did that to her.

The Irish activist Jerry Adams wrote that one morning he woke up and realized that there was life after the struggle. That’s the moment that peace in Northern Ireland became possible. It is time for all those groups who claim they support abortion rights and gay rights to do the same – realize that there is life after the battle is won and file the lawsuits needed, based in the correct Constitutional principles, not the ones that can be end-run. Until then, they just look like a bunch of folks reluctant to give up their means of support.