[and I'm back!]

The South Dakota abortion ban, which was handily rejected by voters in 2006, is making an unwelcome return.  Despite the fact that state legislators last year refused to resuscitate a statewide abortion ban (after a statewide organizing drive), a group of lawmakers (and others) are circulating a petition to get an abortion ban referendum on the ballot next November (this time with exceptions for rape, incest, and a woman’s health). They need about 16,000 signatures to get it on the ballot; there are 800 abortions performed annually in South Dakota.

The kicker in all this? One of the legislation’s sponsors is an Ob/Gyn who for one year worked at a Planned Parenthood.  From the Rapid City Journal:

Thirteen people sponsored the petition, including Dr. Patricia Giebink, a Chamberlain obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions at Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls in 1996 and 1997. In 2006, she started working on the campaign to ban them.

The proposal would effectively prohibit abortions as a means of birth control, Giebink said.

“This is what the people said they wanted after the 2006 campaign. And a number of polls since then indicate a majority of people believe abortion should not be a method of birth control,” Giebink said.

“We have worked with a panel of experts to ensure this bill will make a good law. We went with what we did before, plus we made the changes that we said the people wanted.”

Ok, first, as Cara points out, abortions are a method of birth control in the most formalistic sense — they prevent births.  Second, is anyone else sick of this birth control as straw man argument? Because I sure am. There’s more than ample proof that the vast majority of women do what they can to prevent pregnancies. What’s more, discussing abortion as birth control as in “an easier substitute for the pill” shows a total lack of understanding of the intricacies of women’s lives — the fact that some women cannot afford or do not have access to birth control, the fact that cultural barriers or domestic violence prevents a woman from using birth control when she would like to, the fact that sometimes pregnancy just … happens. Pretending for your own PR that women are just too damn irresponsible to prevent pregnancy in the first place is both condescending and flat-out not true.

The great irony, of course, is that the rhetoric surrounding the push for an abortion ban in South Dakota has been all about how abortion “hurts” women (though notably lacking any proof that it does). But I can’t think of much that would hurt women more in the long run than talking about them (us) as if they (we) were five year olds who just didn’t think of the consequences of their (our) actions.

The blogosphere has been a-twitter with the news this week of a proposed Missouri ballot initiative that would virtually ban abortion in the state. Unlike the South Dakota ban that was defeated last year, this ballot initiative does not come right out and admit its intentions to bar the procedure; instead, it would create such onerous requirements that no doctors would be able to perform abortion in the state and it would become de facto illegal. Insidious, huh?

Here’s why: According to the Jefferson City (MO) Star, the Missouri ballot initiative “would require doctors to extensively review the medical literature on abortion and investigate each patient’s background and lifestyle. It would require doctors to certify that the abortion was better for the woman than a full-term pregnancy.”

Taking a page right of Justice Kennedy’s Gonzales v. Carhart play book, in which he more than implied that women should not be trusted with a “decision so fraught with emotional consequences,”  this ban suggests that women are not…smart? autonomous? adult?…enough to decide for themselves whether or not to end a pregnancy. Instead, doctors need to protect the poor little women to make sure they don’t make a mistake. And if the doctors “fail” and a woman later regrets her abortion? The doctor would be subject to civil suit.

Missouri’s ballot initiative makes clear how worried we should be about the emergence of the “abortion hurts women” argument – a line of “reasoning” that first appeared in the fight over the South Dakota ban. That the “abortion hurts women” line resonates with so many people is worrisome. Not because it’s true (which, on the whole, it is not), but because it validates the antiquated thinking that women are not men’s equals and not entitled to the full autonomy that citizenship provides. And because so many people seem to want that idea validated to begin with.