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Thursday, March 09, 2006

The Disease Spreads Quickly
Posted by Jill | 5:54 AM

And I'm not talking about avian flu, either:

Earlier this week, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation banning most abortions, exempting only cases when the mother's life is in danger. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says he will sign such a ban if it also excepts cases of rape and incest. Lawmakers in eight other states are considering similar steps.

Those state officials, like conservative activist groups, are emboldened by a rightward shift throughout the federal bench during the Bush administration. As a result, they show increasing willingness to test the staying power of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe decision, which placed abortion rights within the Constitution's privacy protections. Its reversal would clear the way for a state-by-state battle over whether, and under what circumstances, abortion could remain legal.


Meanwhile, just to give you a heads-up: I have someone investigating the legality of sending not real (that would probably be illegal handling of medical waste), but symbolic used sanitary products (i.e. pads and tampons dyed red) to the governor of South Dakoka as a symbolic gesture to point out the absurdity of defining human life as beginning at fertilization, given that up to 40% of fertilized eggs never implant and are passed out of the body in the normal menstrual cycle. If this turns out to be legal, I'll let you know. I think deluging the South Dakota statehouse with tons of symbolically used rags would be hilarious.

It sounds to me like that state-by-state battle is already going on. And by the way, given that an even LESS wingnut version of this court decied Bush v. Gore so badly that even it decided it shouldn't be used as precedent, there is no reason why the Roberts/Alito court couldn't simply refuse to hear these abortion cases and leave Roe intact. This way, states run by wingnuts could decide that all women who aren't virtuous religious virgins are by definition whores, and legal abortion would end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Here's what's going on in some other states:

In Ohio, legislation has been introduced to ban all abortions without any exceptions. In Michigan, efforts are under way to get an abortion-ban ballot initiative before voters in November. In Missouri, the Senate is considering a ban on all abortions except to save the mother's life. Mississippi's House passed an abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the mother's life, and the measure is likely to pass the Senate.
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