Surprise, surprise. The South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion is recommending more restrictions on abortion with the goal of a total ban. You shouldn’t be surprised. This was a done deal from the outset. While there were advocates on both sides, the anti-abortion forces dominated and there were few appointees who might have even a degree of objectivity.
Sadly, it looks like the media is playing catch-up on this deal. Moreover, the state’s largest daily cut the AP article to just a few paragraphs. Todd Epp yesterday posted the same report I got on the final meeting of that committee. I won’t repeat it here but it’s worth reading What I find most interesting in the report is the desire to quash any effort to otherwise reduced unwanted unplanned (dawnne’s comment is correct) pregnancies.
As I’ve said before, it strikes me that taking steps to help prevent unwanted unintended pregnancies would be one of the first and best methods to stop or reduce abortions. Yet the anti-abortion forces only seem interested in abstinence in that regard. If you have any questions about the efficacy of such an approach, look at how well Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” worked in fighting drug use in the country.
Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Tim:
The problem I have with this whole abortion issue, and in particular with it in this State that is now our home, is the implicit duplicity of how pro-lifers equate “pro-choice” with “anti-life”. Like so many other examples of latent fundamentalist propaganda, it misconstrues the fact that a “pro-choice” believer may well choose to carry a child to full term. My mother was pro-choice, for example. Despite the fact that having me sorely impacted her relationship with her own parents, who forced her to place me for adoption, she chose to have me.
That aside, one of the reasons that we’re very pleased to have our children in South Dakota schools is the parallel focus on critical thinking, problem-solving, and responsibility that accompanies schoolastic requirements. These values (traditionally considered to be socially conservative) are quite welcome in our otherwise progressive household, and both my wife and I support these ideas at home and as we help out in our children’s classes at school.
What is thus so ironic to me, then, is that these fundamentalists set common sense aside in their approach to reducing “unwanted” pregnancies (in quotes because there’s a rather significant bias in that word — it should be “unplanned”). Instead of following through with the same common-sense approach that the rest of education supports around here, fundamentalists instead require that one particular method (born of inherently insular religious beliefs) be blindly followed and enforced upon everyone — even those who do not share their religious beliefs. It is an incredible mockery of the very social principles they support in all other facets of their children’s education.
Of course, it’s a lead-by-example world; I wonder how many of their children realize the duplicity of their lack of application of common sense, and how that ultimately serves the continuance of their religious beliefs.