When South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed a draconian abortion ban into law earlier this month, he throttled the next vehicle through which the radical right hopes to impose a bureaucratic chokehold on women's birth canals. It reflects the newfound conservative strategy to chip away at abortion rights through the state-by-state passage of proposals mandating everything from parental notification to mandatory pre-procedure waiting periods.
Now, in a clear case of one-upmanship in facetious Republican extremism, 11 state Legislatures around the country are using the South Dakota initiative as a springboard to hurdle constitutional precedent and entice the recently reshuffled Supreme Court to revisit the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision that currently protects women's bodies from the probing hands of rabid politicians.
With the recent appointments of Justices Roberts and Alito serving as potential foreshadowing for a future court stacked on the right side of the ideological seesaw, we may be in the midst of the largest and most tactful political surge attempting to overturn Roe since it was first enacted.
In response to the actions of Gov. Rounds and company, Wisconsin state Rep. Terese Berceau, D-Madison, introduced a bill repealing the state's criminal abortion statute, a legislative artifact that makes South Dakota's bill appear rather forbearing. Rendered unenforceable after Roe, the current law — which dates back to the mid-1800s — threatens women and doctors with significant prison sentences and makes no exception for rape or incest victims, or for patients who require the procedure to preserve their health.
Though Rep. Berceau's proposal stands little chance in a state Legislature sprinkled with Right to Life poster boys who love to dress up their families in creepy renditions of the nativity scene, it reflects the overarching need to abolish outdated state laws that poorly reflect a time when a majority of Americans support some form of legalized abortion. Besides Wisconsin, similar archaic statutes remain on the books in three other states. If Roe is eventually overturned, they would automatically go into effect.
Even staunch pro-lifers realize the necessity of terminating pregnancies based on circumstance — and therefore, recent pushes have focused primarily on abortion restrictions. But the current assault presumes to outlaw the procedure completely and eviscerate the rights of a woman over her most prized entity. This wouldn't put an end to abortion by any means — but only ensure a return to pre-Roe conditions, when abortion was prevalent enough and the risk of death for women who obtained them was three to four times higher than it is today.
Perhaps one could take the anti-abortion movement seriously if it didn't include an all-out attack on the very methods and mechanisms which directly prevent unwanted pregnancies — including contraceptives and safe-sex education. It always boggles my mind how those most adamantly opposed to abortion are the very ones who threaten collective initiatives attempting to prevent it.
The South Dakota proposal came at the heels of a vote in the Missouri legislature banning state-funded family-planning clinics from dispensing birth control. It also coincided with federal initiatives blocking over-the-counter sale of emergency contraceptives and keeping 100 percent effective vaccines for HPV — the rampant virus that causes genital herpes and cervical cancer — from becoming readily available. And our own state Legislature has proved its ingenuity once again through proposals blocking access to emergency contraceptives and pushing abstinence as the mandated priority approach to sex education in schools.
And therein lies the hypocrisy. You tell women that they cannot have abortions, but you don't teach them how to protect themselves from needing one — and hinge your hope on blind faith that preaching teachers alone will curb young people's curiosity. You tell sexually-active individuals that they need to be more careful, and when they try to, you dangle protection resources just out of their reach. And, just to bury the hatchet, you deprive the general public of a vaccination which will save the lives of thousands of women every year.
One would think that the right hates the idea of heterosexual relations almost as much as they hate the idea of homosexual ones.
As long as citizens lack the mechanisms to prevent unwanted pregnancies, this country will have no shortage of unfit, incapable and unwilling mothers desperate for options. An abortion ban, then, will do little to stop such procedures from happening — but only ensure that they occur under dangerous conditions in dirty back alleys instead of the safety of clean, accessible, affordable health clinics. Now there's a dose of hard-line realism from a utopian liberal.
Though it's difficult to interpret the rhetoric spewing out of both sides of the GOP's mouth, their message to Americans — particularly its youth — is quite clear: if you have sex, we're going to make your life a living hell.
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and African studies.
