South Dakota Becomes Abortion Battleground

Oct. 19, 2006 — -- At Vote Yes for Life, the headquarters of the campaign to reinstate the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country, the phone banks are humming.

"Your vote can help protect the health of South Dakota women and save the lives of thousands of unborn children," says one youthful volunteer working the phones.

"Hello, my name is Perry," he says at another point. "I'm a volunteer at the Vote Yes for Life campaign."

Perry works alongside several other volunteers in a huge former flower warehouse out near the Sioux Falls airport. And it is here, in this gritty industrial neighborhood, that he and his friends try to change the nation.

"This is probably the greatest hope to the pro-life movement that's happened in 33 years," says Leslee Unruh, the manager at Vote Yes for Life.

The law they're fighting for bans abortions in all cases except when the life of the mother is at stake. There are no exceptions for rape, no exceptions for incest, no exceptions for fetal deformity. No exceptions.

Why the fight is on to reinstate the law requires some explanation.

Last spring, Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, signed the abortion ban into law. It was passed overwhelmingly in both houses of the state legislature. But it never took effect because, under South Dakota law, people can challenge laws they don't like if they can obtain enough signatures on a petition -- something opponents of the abortion ban quickly did, with thousands to spare.

"Certainly if the ban went into effect, I would not be able to practice medicine the way I would wish to practice medicine," says Dr. Maria Bell of the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families. Her organization opposes the ban.

Not that Bell performs abortions. No doctor in South Dakota does. There is only one clinic in the state where abortions can be obtained. It's in Sioux Falls, and the doctors who do the procedure are flown in from out of state. Still, Bell opposes the notion of lawmakers interfering with medicine.

"I shouldn't be thinking about what my government will allow me to do for the patient's health," she says.

The law's advocates say it most certainly does allow exceptions for rape and incest, though the words "rape" and "incest" cannot be found anywhere in the legal language. And a fair reading of the law's wording leaves their assertions open to challenge, to say the least.

They contend there is no ban on the "morning after" contraceptive. And that pill, say the law's promoters, would take care of unwanted pregnancies such as those that result from rape or incest without the need for an abortion.

Though because the pill works only in the first 72 hours after intercourse, even the law's advocates concede a woman would have no way of knowing if she was pregnant immediately after rape or incest. Moreover, for a victim of rape or incest, getting to a pharmacy might not be the first priority.

Nor is the pill as easy to get as one who lives outside South Dakota might assume. Inside the state, only 50 percent of drugstores carry the "morning after" pill, and pharmacists who don't want to sell it don't have to.

State Rep. Roger Hunt says he is confident voters will reinstate the law on Nov. 7.

"I have a lot of faith in the people of the state of South Dakota on this issue," says Hunt, who sponsored the ban in the legislature.

If the law is reinstated, Hunt expects a court challenge that will take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And, he hopes, the justices on the Roberts Court will be far more receptive to the law than their predecessors were.

David Kranz, a columnist for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, says the strategy has been clear for a long time.

"In my opinion, I think it was just put together to challenge Roe v. Wade," Kranz says.

But what makes this an interesting contest is you can find a lot of people in South Dakota who call themselves pro-life but who oppose this ban on abortion. David Volk, a former Republican state treasurer, is one of them.

"I think it's going to be defeated, and I hope it is," he says.

Volk and others believe an incremental approach in which legal challenges chip away at the rules of Roe v. Wade is much more effective and much less risky.

"I think they passed the wrong bill, and I think because of that they can actually hurt the pro-life movement," Volk says.

A defeat in the Supreme Court or, worse, having the Court simply dismiss the law out of hand without even hearing the case, would be tantamount to handing a big victory to those who advocate abortion on demand, he says.

"I really don't know how many more opportunities we're going to have to fight this fight," Volk says. "And so I think we need to pick and choose our battles very, very carefully."

Unruh, of Vote Yes for Life, says it's time for people to stand up and vote the way they say they think. Either South Dakota is a state that opposes abortion, she says, or it is not.

And Unruh is clear about what she thinks will happen.

"I think abortions will stop in South Dakota," she says.