South Dakota Abortion Ban Recall Drive Begins; Mississippi Ban Dies

[See the campaign's website at: http://www.sdhealthyfamilies.org/ -CRJ]

Abortion battle begins in South Dakota
Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:19 PM GMT

SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) - Abortion-rights supporters planned to launch an attack on Friday on a new South Dakota abortion law designed as a direct challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion 33 years ago.

An abortion-rights coalition, South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, said it would lay out its strategy to take down the law in mid-morning news conferences in Sioux Falls and Rapid City.

The Sioux Falls local newspaper reported that the group would announce a petition drive to overturn the law through a referendum in November. The group has not publicly detailed its strategy, but participants in the campaign have said that a referendum had advantages over a lawsuit.

"When you take things to the courts you don't have the opportunity to engage the public in the process. You don't have the ability to build a movement," said Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kate Looby.

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, signed the law, widely considered the most restrictive in the nation, March 6. The measure bans nearly all abortions, even in cases of incest and rape, and says that if a woman's life is in jeopardy, doctors must try to save the life of the foetus as well as the woman.

To get the issue on the ballot for the November 7 election, abortion rights supporters must collect more than 16,700 signatures by June 19.

If they fail to get enough signatures by the deadline and there is no further legal challenge, the law would take effect on July 1.

A petition drive would fly in the face of the expectations of abortion opponents, who have been counting on a legal challenge to the law in the hopes that the case would eventually make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

With two conservative justices recently appointed to the high court, abortion opponents believe they have an improving chance of overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established the right to abortion.


Group kicks off petition drive to put abortion ban to voters

Fri, Mar. 24, 2006
DIRK LAMMERS for THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - A coalition opposed to South Dakota's newly passed ban on abortion began a petition drive Friday to let voters decide the fate of the law.

South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families announced its intent to put the issue on the November ballot at coordinated news conferences in Sioux Falls and Rapid City.

State Rep. Elaine Roberts, D-Sioux Falls, said she doesn't believe lawmakers represented the will of the people with the ban and the issue should be put to residents.

"The vast majority of South Dakotans are somewhere in the middle," said Roberts, one of the group's 15 co-chairs. "They have mixed feelings about this issue."

The proposed law, which won strong approval in the South Dakota Legislature and was signed by Gov. Mike Rounds, will automatically be placed on hold if 16,728 signatures are collected by June 19.

Leslee Unruh, a Sioux Falls anti-abortion advocate who lobbied for the ban, said the petition drive is a slap in the face of the legislative process.

"We don't need a legislature if we want to just have the people of South Dakota vote on everything," she said Friday.

Rounds issued a statement on the potential referendum. "We were one of the first states in the nation to allow for the initiated measure and referendum process," Rounds said. "It is a well-established part of our political process."

South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families is a coalition of several former and current lawmakers, doctors and others across the state, said Jan Nicolay, a former state representative and the group's spokeswoman.

Both the state's Planned Parenthood chapter and NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota issued statements Friday supporting the petition drive.

Nicolay said coalition members are concerned about families, but people shouldn't impose their one personal idea or value on another, or the entire state.

"They talk about families and we do, too, but we think families should have choices," Nicolay said.

Unruh, who founded the Alpha Center, a Sioux Falls pregnancy counseling agency that discourages women from having an abortion, said supporters of South Dakota's ban would turn the battle into an educational campaign.

"I think that it's a great chance for South Dakota people to be informed about how abortion hurts women and what abortion does to the child," Unruh said.

An out-of-state group filed a similar petition last week, but South Dakota activists asked the Wisconsin-based Basic-Abortion-Rights Network to bow out so they could start their own drive.

The South Dakota secretary of state's office Friday morning received petition paperwork signed by Dr. Maria Bell, also one of the group's co-chairs.

Bell, who served as vice chair of a 17-member abortion task force, walked out of the task force's contentious final meeting in December, saying the process was one-sided and the majority's recommendations were not supported by information collected by the panel.

The legislation, due to be enacted July 1, would ban all abortions except those necessary to save women's lives. Supporters said their goal is to spark a legal battle leading the Supreme Court to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

Opponents complain the South Dakota legislation is too extreme because it provides no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of women.

Roberts said South Dakotans also have to realize that if they say "yes" to the law, they're saying "yes" to millions of dollars in litigation.

Unruh said she expects the issue will turn into an expensive campaign for both sides but supporters of the law are ready for a fight.

"I'm confident that South Dakotans will stand up for the least of these and they will vote on behalf of unborn children in November," she said.

Lars Herseth, a former state lawmaker from Houghton, said he will help circulate petitions. The Legislature and governor went "way overboard" with an abortion ban that contains almost no exceptions, he said.

"Had they worded that (legislation) differently, I don't know that there'd be a referendum," Herseth said.

"The group that passed the law has kind of misread South Dakota and where South Dakota's at," he said. "That's my reason for personally getting involved with this."


Feminist Daily News Wire
March 28, 2006
Abortion Ban Killed in Mississippi

Late last night the proposed Mississippi abortion ban was killed when the Republican Chair of the Senate's Public Health and Welfare committee, Alan Nunnelee refused to sign the House bill. The House chair Democrat Steve Holland called Nunnelee's bluff by essentially agreeing to all provisions of the ban. Holland told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger "we brought them a ban on abortion." Nunnelee said the bill was so complicated tat it would require lawyers to review it. "It's a very complex conference report, and I can't make a judgement on that," said Nunnelee. The end result is that the abortion ban is dead this legislative session in the Mississippi.

"For the past two weeks the legislative galleries have been filled with abortion rights supporters. During this time we outnumbered the prolifers 4-1," said Susan Hill, president of the National Women's Health Organization, which runs the Jackson Women's Health Organization, the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi. This outcome show the right to life movement is quite divided in what to do about abortion bans. The National Right to Life Committee has indicated such bans are premature, and the White House appears not to want more bans in this election year.