By Brian Bohl
Give credit to South Dakota for operating almost completely below our country’s polarized political landscape. After years of unresolved debates at the local and federal level, a state with only one area code and a single noteworthy tourist attraction tremendously impacted the way municipal governments will address the issue of abortion, which is fast becoming the most divisive topic in the United States outside of the Iraq war.
When South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed the “Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Act” on March 6, a state with a population of less than one million became the champions of a movement to outlaw abortion in most, if not all forms. Ultimately, the bill seeks to overturn the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which established the federal right to an abortion.
Under this new law, doctors in South Dakota who help perform abortions can be charged with a felony. The provisions in the law would make the reason for the abortion irrelevant, unless the procedure was necessary to save the woman’s life. There are no exceptions for rape or incest, and outside of a legal challenge, the ban will go into effect July 1.
The ramifications of this decision are already reverberating across several other states. On March 16, the Kansas City Star reported that the Missouri House voted “to ban state funding of contraceptives for low-income women and to prohibit state-funded programs from referring those women to other programs.” While Republican lawmakers in the state backed their decision with the expected rhetoric of upholding moral obligations to society, the facts of the situation show that abortion is being used as a means to ensure the continued support of a very specific demographic of the electorate, instead of the well being of people as a whole. Representative Rachel Storch, a St. Louis Democrat, cited a study that found the teenage birth rate in Missouri dropped 32 percent from 1991 to 2002, which can be attributed to wider availability of contraceptives.
Very few people argue a declining teenage birth rate is a bad thing. Yet, the Missouri House loves people and morality so much that they plan on pursuing a course of action guaranteed to contribute to greater unwanted and unexpected pregnancies, and tragically, more abortions. The decision of the Missouri state government is perplexing, because they want to discourage abortions while at the same time make it harder for young women to get access to the contraceptives that would surely help to prevent pregnancy termination. This action makes as much sense as encouraging people to stop smoking, but outlaw nicotine patches and gum.
Missouri is just one of a few states that is working to make abortions illegal, or at the very least harder to get. Earlier this month, the Tennessee state
Senate gave the green light to a measure that could eventually amend the state constitution so that it places a woman’s right to an abortion in the hands of the General Assembly, according to the Nashville Tennessean. The measure could eventual lead to a constitutional referendum in 2010 that would state, “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”
Those of us on the East Coast can sometimes mock the viability of smaller states such as South Dakota, but as the aforementioned events attest to, one single act by a state government can set in motion a series of events around the country that could impact every single U.S citizen in the future. Keep in mind that the United States still uses the Electoral College to select a President, meaning the power of individual states is an influential factor when Presidential candidates start establishing campaign platforms for 2008. Any news article with the dateline Pierre, South Dakota may automatically signal a big city reader to skip over to something more interesting, but the decisions rendered by small state governments will have a profound effect on how our government ultimately decides the abortion issue.