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Telling Doctors What To ThinkSouth Dakota's unbelievable new abortion law.

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:43 PM ET
Diana Murphy

In 2005, South Dakota passed an unprecedented abortion law. The statute purports to be about ensuring that patients give informed consent. Planned Parenthood characterizes it differently: as an intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, forcing doctors to give inaccurate medical facts and to be the state's ideological mouthpiece. Now, following a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, the law is about to go into effect for the first time. And the question is how it will change the experience of going to get an abortion—and whether it will open a new front in the abortion wars by encouraging other states to follow suit.

The South Dakota law requires doctors to give patients who come for an abortion a written statement telling them that "the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being," and that they have "an existing relationship with that unborn human being" that is constitutionally protected. (What does the constitutionally protected part mean? Who knows.) In addition, doctors are ordered to describe "all known medical risks of the procedure and statistically significant risk factors," including "depression and related psychological distress" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide."

The idea behind the statute is that if you force women to confront the implications of an abortion, they'll be less likely to go through with it. That's what the "whole, separate, unique, living human being" language is about. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that a fetus is not a person, in the legal sense of the word, which is to say it doesn't have the same rights. So South Dakota couldn't order doctors to tell women that to have an abortion is to kill a person. But human being is a different term that's up for grabs, the drafters of the legislation decided.

This was the insight of a smart New Jersey lawyer named Harold Cassidy, who has represented women who've accused abortion providers of malpractice, and who helped draft South Dakota's statute. Cassidy also helped persuade state lawmakers that women might be scared out of having abortions if doctors were forced to enumerate the procedure's medical risks. This is where the idea of linking abortion to depression and increased risk of suicide comes in. Never mind that the weight of the medical evidence tilts heavily against the increased-suicide tie or that there's more evidence of a link between depression and unintended pregnancy—or simply giving birth—than between depression and abortion, according to most of the literature.

If you care about doctors' freedom of speech, or their responsibility to give accurate information to patients, the South Dakota statute looks pretty alarming. And yet by a vote of seven judges to four, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit managed to weave its way around these concerns last week. After sitting on the case for more than a year, the court instructed abortion clinics (actually, clinic, since there's only one in South Dakota) to put the law into effect in mid-July.

In a majority opinion by Judge Raymond Gruender, the court ruled only on the "human being" part of the statute—a challenge to the suicide provision is still pending before a lower court. (Planned Parenthood decided it could live with the depression provision because the law doesn't claim that abortion increases that risk.) Planned Parenthood argued that the state is legislating morality because to call a fetus a "whole, separate, unique, living human being" is an ideological statement, not a medical one. The Supreme Court has told the states that it's not for them to resolve when life begins—and it should certainly follow from this that they can't force any such resolution on doctors. As the 8th Circuit dissent by Judge Diana Murphy points out, the question "in some sense encompass[es] the whole philosophical debate about abortion."

But none of this swayed the majority. They bought the state's argument that the statute circumvents ideology by defining "human being," elsewhere in the statute, as "an individual living member of the species Homo sapiens, including the unborn human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages from fertilization to full gestation." Presto, said the majority—with that definition, the "truthfulness and relevance" of the provision "generates little dispute." Yes, this logic is as tautological as it sounds. The legislature basically defined "human being" to include unborn human beings.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
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