Fine tuning South Dakota law
I keep reporting as often as possible the correct protections and prohibitions of the South Dakota “Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Law,” or Referred Law 6 on the November referendum. The media, across the spectrum, are reporting that the law contains no exception for rape and incest, a falsehood that Planned Parenthood and NARAL are beating like a drum to dupe the citizens of South Dakota into voting the law down.
Poeple’s sympathies on rape and incest usually cause them to want that protection, as a minimum. That’s why the legislature that designed the protection of life law wrote that into it. It’s there. But because the campaign of disinformation has been so sweeping, a lot of folks don’t know it’s there. After reading the post below, a reader wrote in with this:
I guess I fell for the hype too. What’s the exception for victims of rape or incest?
Glad you asked. First, the section before that provision:
Section 2. …No person may knowingly administer to, prescribe for, or procure for, or sell to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, or other substance with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being. No person may knowingly use or employ any instrument or procedure upon a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human being.
Any violation of this section is a Class 5 felony.
Now, the rape and incest exception clause, with an explanation to follow:
Section 3. That chapter 22-17 be amended by adding thereto a NEW SECTION to read as follows:
Nothing in section 2 of this Act may be construed to prohibit the sale, use, prescription, or administration of a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical, if it is administered prior to the time when a pregnancy could be determined through conventional medical testing and if the contraceptive measure is sold, used, prescribed, or administered in accordance with manufacturer instructions.
That is the most carefully crafted and finely tuned provision of any rape or incest exception in existence, because the whole intent of the South Dakota legislature is to protect women from the devastation of knowingly taking the life of their unborn child. In the case of true rape or incest — with legal and judicial officials available around the clock for emergency determination of the need — a woman has access to emergency contraception in the 72 hours following the assault. Either no conception will have occurred, or if it has, the emergency contraception will prevent fertilization, or if conception has occurred, it will fail to implant. This is calculated to maybe happen in one newly conceived life a year, if that, and even that would be a lost soul and offensive to pure pro-life protection.
However, it is the best protection ever written and enacted in the 33 years since Roe, and the least possible provision necessary to enact a law that protects life. Read the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion Report to see the breadth and depth of evidence of the ravages of abortion to women and the knowledge of human life that the abortion movement denies in their clinics. Read the report to discover the three constitutional protections never before raised or applied for women and their unborn children, which turned the South Dakota legislature around on the issue.
And read the six false assumptions of Roe that the report lists, they’re startling. One of them is the assumption that “there would be a normal healthy physician-patient relationship in which the doctor would impart pertinent information, and that decisions would be made through consultation between the physician and the patient.” Imagine that.
The 2,000 post-abortive women who testified before that task force gave witness that they were told — if anything – essentially that the contents of their uterus amounted to a ‘blob of tissue’ and not a human life.
The two best sites I know of on this, filled with information about the South Dakota law and efforts to pass the “Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Law,” are here and especially here.
