The South Dakota legislature passed a bill today, (50-18 in the House, 23-12 earlier this week in the Senate,) that prohibits vast majority of abortions in the state, and provides the opportunity to appeal the Roe v. Wade decision to the new more conservative Supreme Court.
Republican Governor Mike Rounds said he would sign the bill, creating a law that would make it a crime to perform an abortion unless the mother would die without such a procedure.
Under the law, neither rape nor incest would constitute an exception to the measure that would become law July 1.
Doctors who violate the proposed law could be sentenced to five years in prison.
Alarmingly, the ban on almost all abortions is not the most alarming part of the bill, it gets worse; "If a woman who is raped becomes pregnant, the rapist would have the same rights to the child as the mother," Krista Heeren-Graber, executive director of the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault told the Associated Press.
What right do these men have dictating how a woman ought to live her life? Not only is this unacceptable, it is irresponsible.
For a long time, I believed the worst thing one could do to a rape victim is make her give birth to a child conceived during a vicious rape, I now see things differently. After learning of this new law in South Dakota, I now realize the worst thing one could do is force a woman to share said child with the animal that so viciously attacked her.
There are a few things wrong with this part of the new law. For one thing, the mother ought to have chief decision making power of who is in her child's life until proven she is incompetent to make such a decision. Second, this person VICIOUSLY ATTACKED an innocent woman. Why would anyone give such an animal such access or allow him to have such power over a new life? And third, the individuals who suffer the most in the situation are the mother and child; the father actually gets rewarded for having committed one of the worst crimes imaginable.
The state of South Dakota really needs to reconsider its proposed law before potential rapists receive incentive to seek out a victim and be linked forever with the woman of his choosing.