South Dakota
As you know, South Dakota did THIS very recently. Do they not remember what happend the first time around? What is happening in many other countries RIGHT NOW? I don't care what your personal moral views are on abortion. Statistics show that restricting or prohibiting access to abortion does not make it disappear, it only forces women to seek illegal abortions, which KILLS AND MAIMS WOMEN.
HERE's another fun little tidbit from the legislation: There are no exceptions for victims of rape or insest. If a woman who is raped becomes pregnant, the rapist would have the same rights to the child as the mother, said Krista Heeren-Graber, executive director of the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault. Swell eh?
Illegal abortions are unsafe and currently account for 13% of all deaths of women because of serious complications. (emedicine.com, consumer health)
You can send your wire coat hangers and knitting needles to:
Office of the Governor
500 E. Capitol Ave.
Pierre, SD 57501
(cross posted all over the place)
You can contact your own Senators here and voice your outrage.
You can get hold of your Representatives here
(Thanks Ms. RubyGloom!)
Bernard Nathanson, M.D., a recently converted anti-abortion activist describes in his 1996 autobiography, The Hand of God, the horrors women faced before Roe v. Wade:
At least two-thirds of the clinic females ambulanced to our emergency room in the middle of the night, bleeding profusely and in severe pain, were the victims of botched illegal abortions, not spontaneous miscarriages. . . . Those of us practicing gynecology no longer see the results of illegal induced abortion: the raging fevers, the torn and obstructed intestines; the shredded uterus requiring immediate hysterectomy; the raging infections leaving many women sterile, exhausted, in chronic pain. . . . Illegal abortion was in 1967 the number one killer of pregnant women.
"Every year," according to Davis, "more than 350,000 women who had an illegal abortion suffered complications serious enough to be hospitalized; 500 to 1,000 of them died." (54) Today, approximately 70,000 women die from unsafe abortions each year, 69,000 of them from less developed countries. A significantly larger number of women suffer complications from the estimated 20 million unsafe abortions undergone annually around the world. (55)