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Posted
Thursday, July 03, 2008 10:58 AM
| By
Dana Stevens
But back to South Dakota. Imagine you live there—in Rapid City, say—and you want an abortion. Who knows why? Maybe you’ve been raped; maybe you’re in an abusive relationship with a partner on whom you’re financially dependent; maybe you’re only 15. Or maybe, for reasons that are nobody’s business, you just really don’t want to have a baby right now. The point is, you need, with some urgency, to schedule a medical procedure that’s been legal in this country for 35 years.
So you get in your car, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and drive 350 miles to Sioux Falls, where the state’s lone abortion clinic is located (let me repeat that: a state with an area of 77,121 square miles has only one clinic that will perform abortions). How you get time off work to make this six-hour-each-way drive, what you tell your family about where you’re going, or how you get past the protesters screaming outside the clinic is not my concern here. No, I’m thinking of the moment when, filling out the paperwork for a procedure that (like many medical events in life) may already have you ambivalent, worried, and scared, you’re asked to sign a statement attesting that what you’re about to do will “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” To translate: We’ll help you terminate that pregnancy right away, little lady—as soon as you admit in writing that you’re a murderer.
The trauma induced by this forced confession probably will scare a few women out of the clinic (hell, all it took for Juno was an ugly waiting room), and thus slightly increase the population of South Dakota. But it seems incredible that the state legislature, with its Justice Kennedy-inspired concern for the “depression” and “increased suicidal ideation” that abortion supposedly brings about, haven’t considered the harm that might come as a result of being forced to sign such a document (in the presence of a doctor who, as Emily points out, is also being legally compelled to lie about his or her beliefs). I’d hope that even those opposed to abortion, whether for themselves or as a matter of public policy, would blanch at the idea of such state-sponsored moral bullying.
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