Groups Supporting, Opposing South Dakota Abortion Ban Campaign In Days Before Election

Supporters of a South Dakota law (HB 1215) banning abortions except to save a woman's life are "hoping to tug at voters' emotions" in the final moments before Tuesday's election, while the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, which opposes the law, over the last weekend sent about 2,000 volunteers to campaign door-to-door, the Los Angeles Times reports (Simon, Los Angeles Times, 11/5). The Campaign for Healthy Families successfully blocked the July 1 enactment of the law by gathering enough signatures to put the issue on the November ballot (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 11/3). Leslee Unruh -- campaign manager for VoteYesforLife.com, which supports the ban -- recently attended the Campaign for Healthy Families' final rally and released 814 pink and blue balloons to represent the number of abortions in the state in 2005, according to the Times. In addition, 20 women who have had abortions have been working for VoteYesforLife.com's phone bank. Jan Nicolay, co-chair of the Campaign for Healthy Families, said that the group and its volunteers have been sending the message to voters that they "need to stand up and say, 'It's not the government's business to tell women what they should do'" (Los Angeles Times, 11/5).

Opinion Piece
If "all abortion battles" in the U.S. since 1973 -- when the Supreme Court effectively barred state abortion bans with its opinion in Roe v. Wade -- had been fought "democratically" like the ballot initiative in South Dakota has, "[w]e might have reached an answer by now," Laura Vanderkam, a journalism fellow with the Phillips Foundation, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. According to Vanderkam, the Roe decision took the issue of abortion rights away from the "messy, democratic sphere," and positions on the issue have since "hardened into philosophically pure abstractions that don't feel right to many Americans." Many South Dakota residents have said that the debate over the abortion ban has included "refreshingly little screaming" despite "the hostility usually associated" with abortion rights, Vanderkam writes. "South Dakotans have simply discovered that when you have to persuade your neighbors to join your cause -- not judges in Washington -- both sides become remarkably civil," Vanderkam writes, adding that "[w]hat matters" is not the outcome of the initiative but that it has given voters an opportunity to debate abortion rights at the polls (Vanderkam, USA Today, 11/7).

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