Abortion Rights Déjà Vu in South Dakota

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Posted May 26, 2008.

It's baaack. In 2006 South Dakota voters defeated, 56 to 44, a ballot initiative that would have banned abortion even to save the woman's life. Prochoicers cautiously exhaled. Antichoicers got busy. Taking a leaf from polls that suggested a hefty majority would favor a ban as long as it included exceptions for drastic circumstances -- rape, incest, the life or physical health of the woman -- antichoicers have rolled out a new initiative, Measure 11. It contains loopholes, in theory, for rape and incest victims who report the crime to law enforcement and allow collection of their DNA and that of the fetus, as well as to women "at serious risk of a substantial and irreversible impairment of the functioning of a major bodily organ or system." An ominous sign: it was submitted to the secretary of state on March 31 with 46,000 signatures, although only 16,000 were required.

In 2006 activists stressed the lack of exceptions -- you'd force the woman to die? go blind? be paralyzed? bear her father's baby? That argument was persuasive but left the vast majority of women who terminate their pregnancies undefended against the widespread belief that they were selfish sluts who used abortion "as birth control." This is how short-term strategies come back to haunt us. There was always the risk that antichoicers would go for what they could get. As South Dakota's own Leslee Unruh, colorful head of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, told the New York Times, "I have to save as many children as I can."

With 44 percent of South Dakotans supporting the Let the Woman Die ban, what are the chances that the new, supposedly more lenient version will be defeated? Jan Nicolay, co-chair of the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, the group formed to oppose the 2006 ban, told me voters will reject the ban when they realize its implications: forcing women to carry to term fetuses that cannot survive, tying doctors' hands in difficult obstetrical situations, "revictimizing" rape and incest victims by destroying their privacy. Not necessarily, replied a prochoice activist who wished to remain anonymous: "To challenge the exceptions you have to get deep into the fine print. We can't have a two-hour discussion with every voter in South Dakota." She pinned her hopes on another popular strategy: appealing to the state's libertarian streak. South Dakotans, I heard again and again, don't like the government telling people what to do. But does that include women who have abortions -- alternately depicted as tramps who waltz to the clinic after a night on the town and as naïve weaklings pushed into decisions they will later regret? Of the prochoice activists I spoke with, only Charon Asetoyer, a Native American community activist and health advocate running for State Senate, talked directly about organizing voters around the classic feminist theme of faith in women to make good decisions, to do what's best for their families.

If "faith in women" sounds old-fashioned, maybe that's the problem. In this fight, the antichoicers have the vision, the grassroots energy and the political momentum (as well as the Catholic and evangelical churches and key legislators in both parties), while the prochoicers are left with abstract arguments and the fall-back position that the ban, if passed, will be enjoined by the courts and eventually found unconstitutional. "This could be a galvanizing moment," said one out-of-state activist. "It's outrageous that a state could even be considering a ban! Instead of thinking about the Supreme Court, the national organizations -- Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the ACLU -- should be mobilizing women. I don't hear anything creative coming from them." Indeed, as of this writing I haven't received so much as an e-mail about South Dakota from a national reproductive-rights or feminist organization.

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Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

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