On March 6, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed into law a bill banning almost all abortions in the state.
"In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society," Rounds said in a statement.
Some believe this is the beginning of a legal process that will overthrow Roe v. Wade, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America - which operates the state's only abortion clinic - has vowed to fight the bill., which could test the new Supreme Court's position on abortion.
The debate over abortion rights has stretched across decades and generations and has now fallen at our feet.
South Dakota lawmakers are doing what should have been done years ago; they are standing up to Roe v. Wade. Advocates have defended the 1973 decision by arguing that abortion cannot be criminalized since, if it is, thousands and thousands of women will die in "back-alley clinics." Such a defense is characteristic of intellectual intimidation - it is backed by lies.
Bernard Nathanson, one of the original leaders of the pro-abortion movement, has since admitted that he and others intentionally fabricated the number of women who died as a result of illegal abortions. This was the "thousands and thousands of fatalities" from which the back-alley clinic argument drew its strength.
Beyond that, the back-alley defense itself amounts to little more than emotional browbeating. In other words, abortion advocates have claimed the only possible result for criminalizing abortion is something so terrible that no one could possibly disagree, as opposing them would mean supporting alleged back-alley butchery. This sort of bullying has been used to defend abortion for years, despite proof to the contrary.
In Poland, under Communist rule throughout the 1980s, there were consistently more than 100,000 abortions yearly. With the establishment of self-government in the 1990s, abortion began to be discouraged and would eventually be forbidden except in cases of danger to the life of the mother, rape and fetal handicap. The protest in Poland was similar to what one has heard here in the United States: Large numbers of women will die in back-alley clinics as a result. However, in 1994, a full 2 years after the ban had been enacted, abortion had fallen by almost 200 percent, and there was not one death as a result of an illegal abortion. This information comes right from the U.N. Demographics Reports; it's no secret.
The back-alley argument typifies the kind of logic used by abortion advocates through the years - non-existent. Simple substitution demonstrates this. Consider: Since abortion is going to happen even if it is illegal, and illegal abortions cause unacceptable deaths among women, we should just make abortion legal.
Let's use the above lens to examine another issue: Since racial discrimination in the workplace is going to happen even if it is illegal, and said discrimination causes unacceptable distress for minorities, we should just make racial discrimination in the workplace legal.
Clearly, the second "argument" is outrageous, so why would the first not be as well? The fact that something will "happen anyway" is sometimes all the more reason to stand up against it. And in the case of an atrocity as gruesome as abortion, this most certainly is true.
One can only hope that the respect for human life demonstrated by the South Dakota lawmakers will guide us through the testing of our own society.
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