Time reports on a new law from South Dakota:
In an ongoing effort to push legislation to reduce abortion rates — in part by restricting women’s access to the procedure — South Dakota’s Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican, signed into law on Tuesday the most stringent such bill yet.
The new law requires women who seek abortions to first undergo a consultation at a “pregnancy help center,” centers whose counselors oppose abortion. The law also requires women to wait three days after meeting with an abortion provider before she can receive the procedure.
And what sort of qualifications do the people who work at these centers possess?
The centers themselves — which are also known as crisis pregnancy centers, and have been increasing in number nationwide — are not regulated by any medical authority.
So is this, as some like to claim, just a matter of ensuring that these women are “fully informed”, albeit by people with no obvious qualification to do so?
According to the new law, pregnancy help center staff may control who should be allowed in the room during counseling sessions (such as spouses, parents and religious counselors), independent of the woman’s wishes.
Nope, it seems not.
And then there’s this, via the New York Times:
[The law] makes exceptions for medical emergencies, but not for rape or incest.
Grotesque.
Yeah, how grotesque that the government should try to protect the rights of the unborn, the way it protects the rights of everyone else.
Grotesque how the government wants to intrude into one of the most private aspects of a person’s life and trample on the rights of the woman. Grotesque that some politicians feel it’s ok for the government to force a woman to have her rapist’s child.
Why do an unborn child’s rights trump the pregnant woman’s rights? Why should a supposedly broke government put so many resources into regulating pregnancy?
Government to women: all your fetus are belong to us.
I take it that Mark would have no objection to a national or statewide pregnancy register. Or maybe we should start an “unborn” category in the census, and investigate every miscarriage for signs of nefarious action.
Government to women: all your fetus are belong to us.
No, that’s not what’s being said. More like fetii are lifeforms that have interests, too. Their termination should not be treated lightly.
Of course, if the women don’t like it, Minnesota’s right over the border.
I think that’s exactly what’s being said, and I don’t see how a policy like the one proposed can even begin to function without state intrusion into every woman’s womb.
I have no problem with federalism, and if one state wants to do this and others don’t, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But it’s a slippery slope, and unless it’s just a feel-good “think of the fetii” bit of theater, it’s a bad sign.
I am not in favor of abortions either, but then again what are we going to do for punishment? put women in jail? how many murderers or rapists do we release to lock them up? do we take licenses away from doctors? already a shortage of good OBGYN’s who are needed for far more important things than abortions and all of this abortion bullshit is pushing them out of the profession. why when we dont like something do we run to washington? if groups spent just a portion of the money they do on government lobbying to helping women who do get pregnant with their children and helping provide services like childcare, food, etc then maybe there wouldnt be such a problem.
“I don’t see how a policy like the one proposed can even begin to function without state intrusion into every woman’s womb.”
That’s almost incredibly silly. Medical procedures of all kinds are regulated in many different ways, and they aren’t characterized as intrusions. This law is about how abortions may be obtained: the pregnant woman must first get a crash course on what an abortion means. That isn’t the same thing as a law that monitors pregnancies. If there’s a slippery slope here (between the arguments for regulating abortion and some hypothetical argument for regulating pregnancy), your argument isn’t making it at all evident.
If what you folks are saying about this law is correct, I feel fairly sure the market for abortion counselors will boom in that area — I’m sure there will be plenty of room for more abortion marketers. Right now the only people who give a woman regulated counsel about her impending abortion are the people who will take her money for the abortion, so this cannot produce a reduction in quality from the current manifest conflict of interest.
Personally, I suspect that the law does actually regulate how pre-abortion counseling is provided; I don’t think the sponsors of the law actually left it completely open, since that would allow abortion providers to run marketing for their own services, as they do now.
-Wm
I am not in favor of abortions either, but then again what are we going to do for punishment?
This appears to be regulatory in nature — the “punishment” would be to the infringing clinics.
why when we dont like something do we run to washington?
Was Washington recently moved to South Dakota?
-Wm