Its starting to happen, South Dakota bans all abortions

[Seeker30]

SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) - South Dakota became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning abortion in virtually all cases, with the intention of forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 decision legalizing the procedure.

The law, which would punish doctors who perform the operation with a five-year prison term and a $5,000 fine, awaits the signature of Republican Gov. Michael Rounds and people on both sides of the issue say he is unlikely to veto it.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-02-23T030541Z_01_N22531791_RTRUKOC_0_US-RIGHTS-ABORTION.xml

[slor]

1. Well, we knew it was coming...

and as one rethug analyst has stated, "The republican party will cease to exist".

[HillDem]

16. I hope this blows up in their face

And we take out mike rounds, and john thune.

[bluestateguy]

2. I wonder how they will actually enforce the law

What if someone wants to set up an abortion clinic in South Dakota? How will the state stop him? Do they want to try?

[ticapnews]

5. That's the point

Someone is going to be arrested and that will be the case that ends up going to the SCOTUS. If they agree to hear the case, they will overturn Roe.

The case will take years to meander its way to the SCOTUS. Enough time for Justice Stephens to retire (or die) and be replaced by another Alito. The right to abortion (and the greater right to privacy) will be taken away.

[wakeme2008]

8. IMHO Months NOT Years

The Fundies now think they control the SC and they IMHO WILL NOT WAIT YEARS for Roe to be overturned.

[ticapnews]

13. It's not a matter of waiting...

The case will have to work its way through the courts. That will take time. The arrest could come the day the law is signed, but the court case will take years to make it to SCOTUS.

[izzie]

6. People would go to jail, it used to be like this

This is a freedom women and some men gave us after it always being underground. It will just go back underground. Society has always some how got rid of unwanted children or babies. Some people had to tell women how this subject would be treated. Even in our Puritan days you had best not have a 'preemie' for your first child. Sex was and is big business to a church run state.

[fasttense]

14. Here is how it went before abortion was legal.

Illegal abortionists were thriving. Criminologists found abortions were the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the United States, surpassed only by gambling and narcotics.

Some abortionists were performing as many as forty-five abortions a day and between four and five thousand abortions a year.

Doctors and lawyers described criminal abortion as a "hidden social canker," "a festering social ill," and "one of the major medical and social problems of the nation."

Significant statutory restrictions on abortion were unenforceable. "All efforts to control the incidence of criminal abortion by legislation," public health specialists concluded, had "resulted in failure."

A 1963 law review article noted "our nation's abortion laws have admittedly kept legal abortions to a minimum, just as the eighteenth amendment virtually eliminated the legal consumption of liquor." Nevertheless, the author continued, "the abortion enactment have been no more successful in preventing abortion than the eighteenth amendment was in eradicating drinking."

Lacking cooperative witnesses, law enforcement agents could not easily shut down known practitioners of criminal abortion. Moreover, many police officers and prosecutors "share the widespread belief that the abortionist is in fact performing a useful service" and preferred spending their scarce resources preventing what they and their communities regarded as real crimes.

The few prosecutions that were instituted faced jurors unwilling to convict abortionists and judges unwilling to impose severe sentences. Anti-abortion advocates complained that "even the most outrageous abortionist" could not be convicted in a jury trial.

One juror refused to convict a well-known abortionist because there was "nobody in Schuykill County that the doctor hasn't helped."

Half the abortionists convicted in New York between 1925 and 1950 were sentenced only to probation. Dr. Milan Vuitch, a prominent physician-abortionist, was arrested sixteen times for openly running an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. but never went to jail.

Even abortionists convicted and sentenced to prison at trial often escaped legal sanction. A significant number of convictions for illegal abortion were reversed on appeal for constitutional "technicalities," most notably entrapment. Some executives used clemency to keep abortionists on the street.

A New York campaign against illegal abortion during the first decade of the twentieth century came to a dismal conclusion when the only three abortionists convicted were immediately pardoned by the governor."

And so we will go back to this. We Americans will never learn. It didn't work for prohibition and it ain't going to work for anti-choice.

http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/rethink.html

[Vogon_Glory]

15. This Time It May Be Worse

I suspect that if abortions are outlawed, things are going to be worse. Unlike the last time abortions were criminalized, you didn't have self-appointed evangelical vigilantes prowling around women's clinics with video cameras seeking to videotape patients to post on their web sites as "murderers." You didn't have the so-called "Right to Life" movement. You didn't have right-wing R's working to criminalize relatives taking their younger sisters, nieces, and cousins across state lines from one jurisdiction where abortions were unavailable to another where abortions were legal and safe.

I suspect that when women start dying from botched abortions again, the so-called "librul" media will quickly learn to change the subject when the deaths start becoming commonplace.

[LiberalPartisan]

3. Here's why it matters to everyone if Roe is overturned

The Constitutional significance of overturning Roe will be a denial of the individual's right to privacy. Roe was afterall a privacy decison.

It is a near certainty Roe will be overturned. The moment Roe is overturned will mark the complete nullification and final repudiation of the Bill of Rights and the total marginalization of the Constitution by the current regime.

[aquart]

4. So we can expect to see 15 year old South Dakotans on 8th Avenue?

Because they will leave. They will leave family and friends and go to places where strangers can prey on them. This is de facto white slavery. This is a law to guarantee a steady stream of young and desperate girls to be prostitutes to aging white men who can't get laid unless they pay.

This is the Prostitute Propagation Law.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

18. Can you elaborate?

I'm not seeing the connection. Do you mean they will go to the city for the abortions and then stay? Not disagreeing at all, just want to make sure I understand.

[Up2Late]

7. This new law is going to be thrown out of court before it even...

...hits the Judges bench.

It has so many "problems" that have already been thrown out by the Supreme Court, I think they say that it is rejected "with Prejudice."

I think that's what they call it.

[punpirate]

9. Well, no, not exactly...

... the prior version of the law was not signed by the governor, since it would obviously not meet Constitutional tests based on previous SC rulings.

However, this is a new version of the law, and it is intended to test the new mix of justices on the SC. The governor will sign it, and it will almost immediately be challenged, thus giving the SC a new chance to take on the issue.

It's very clear this was done to see if Alito has an influence on the court, to test his resolve to vote with the extreme right, and to see if Kennedy follows the right-wing crowd.

[cali]

10. Red Herring

This law will not be put into practice. It's unconstitutional. The SC will not grant certiorari. And do you know that lots of states still have laws like this on the books? My state of Vermont does, and it has some of the most liberal abortion regs in the country.

The really troubling case is the one the SC is going to hear this term, the federal law banning so called partial birth abortions. It's been declared unconstitutional by the lower courts because it doesn't have a health exception. It seems probable that this law will be allowed to stand. That's a big deal because it opens the door to further erosion of Roe in the post Casey world. And post Casey, when the standard changed, significant erosion has already ocurred. I don't think the scenario plays out with the over turning of Roe in the next 3-5 years. It's more likely that Roe will be hollowed out until it makes a mockery of the constitutional right it granted. Only then will it be overturned. Even if Stevens or Ginsberg retires, and is replaced by a wingnut, I think this is the way it will play out. We have to hope that Steven and Ginsberg hang in there, and that dems take back the Senate in 2006. One bright spot on the horizon is that bushco is running out of time to appoint more radical justices, but it all just hangs by a thread.

[ClintonTyree]

11. Old, white men....

passing judgment on what a woman can and cannot do with her own body. Old, white men intruding on people's right to privacy.

Walt Kelly was right.....


This will be the fight the Reich-Wing has been waiting for, but it may also be the fight that relegates them into the dustbin of history.

[HillDem]

17. Even some Democrats

in the state Senate voted for the bill. Worse than than women democrats voted for it...

[T_Matamoro]

12. Always darkest before the dawn............Says CSN&Y :)

I remeber a line in Braveheart where the king says,"To be a king one must find the good in ALL situations". That is what will happen here. If they are stupid enough to try and overturn Roe v Wade (and if you think they won't grant Citorari youre dead wrong, look at the recent emminent domain decision and the Gore 2000 decision, they are crazy.)
Then two things will happen. 1. The Republican party will be totally thrashed. And I'm not saying this as a partisan Dem! they truly will be thrashed.
2. As far as mobilising all the grassroots people to vote for Pro-choice candidates it will also mobilise a ton for making sure nothing will really happen to women during that tumultious time. Right wingnuts tend to think the the world is flat and ends at the borders of the US. On their maps it says, "here be monsters" for places beyond those lines. :silly: What am i getting at? Well Even if somehow Abortion were illegal in all the US. (wont happen) A person in dire need could still drive to Canada or Mexico where it is still legal. Just like our elderly do when they drive to Canada for their Medicine. I can already see whole Buslines filled with teen mothers heading for a vacation in Toranto Or QUEBEC! OUI! VIVE LE DIFFERANCE! Then the Right wingers will start to call them "the abortion bus" or something. They will probably even try to pass laws making it illegal to leave the US for the purposes of getting a "medical procedure" that is illegal in the US. (nothing will stop these Christo-faschists) But it will be to no avail. Then once them and thier party is completely thrashed onto the ground it will finally be dawn again........................