One church in South Dakota held round-the-clock prayer vigils, asking God to keep that state’s toughest-ever law criminalizing abortions. On November 7, however, voters rejected the law, 55 percent to 45 percent.
That majority is short of the two-to-one advantage traditionally enjoyed by supporters of legal and safe abortions over those who want to ban the procedure. Victory on this take-it-or-leave-it vote — to allow or abolish abortion rights — is especially significant in conservative South Dakota
Leslee Unruh, who headed the campaign to ban abortion, promises a rematch. “We have an army now that we didn’t have before,” she told the Los Angles Times.
And well they may.
Abortion rights opponents like Unruh and Michael Rounds, South Dakota’s Republican Governor (who won reelection, despite signing the abortion ban into law and reiterating his desire to challenge Roe v. Wade), are tireless. Unruh says she has “been fighting [abortion-rights supporters] for years.”
I have been facing down people like her for three decades. Trust me, she’ll be there again tomorrow, and there are millions more where she comes from.
It would be easy for advocates of reproductive freedom to surrender to the heady intoxication of last week’s election results, with their promise to weaken the far right and to breathe new life into the liberal causes we support. Liberty, however, demands constant vigilance, and insight.
Mainstream America understands legalized abortion is necessary. The overwhelming majority of Americans neither want abortion criminalized nor for victims of rape and incest to be further victimized. At the other extreme, they do not favor abortion as a means of birth control or totally “on demand.”
Americans want and need what they call “good reasons” for terminating a pregnancy. The decision is never an easy one, and, frankly, society likes it that way. Americans do not want abortions to be handed out frivolously.
Though much could be said about the “right to privacy” on which America’s abortion rights rest, reproductive freedom will best be preserved through sensitivity to the thoughtfulness of the two-thirds of Americans who, while supporting abortion rights, cannot embrace “abortion on demand.”
In my book, The A Word — Abortion: Real Women, Tough Choices, Personal Freedom (Gadd Books, 2006), I appeal to the two generations of post-Roe adults who have no memory of a world without legal abortion. Such a birthright cools the necessary passion for preserving hard-won reproductive freedoms. Those who wonder why vigilance is important should ask grandma, and then take a place on the front lines.
The US Supreme Court will soon hear arguments favoring a federal ban on the 1.5 percent of late term terminations, craftily named “partial birth abortions” by the same steadfast opposition represented by Unruh. Other states threaten to duplicate the law defeated by South Dakota voters.
Having celebrated victory, we must quickly move on to the next defense of a freedom under constant assault. That’s how it is and how it always has been.
