In this morning’s civil rights roundup David brought us the headline — doctors in South Dakota are now required to tell a woman seeking an abortion that the procedure “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit last week lifted a preliminary injunction handing a victory to antiabortion forces:
The doctors’ script that officially took effect Friday has been tied up in court since 2005, when Planned Parenthood challenged a law that instructed physicians what to tell abortion patients. Under the law, doctors must say that the woman has “an existing relationship” with the fetus that is protected by the U.S. Constitution and that “her existing constitutional rights with regards to that relationship will be terminated.” Also, the doctor is required to say that “abortion increases the risk of suicide ideation and suicide.”
The message must be delivered no earlier than two hours before the procedure. The woman must say in writing that she understands.
Emily Bazelon, who did a background story on the law a few weeks ago, blames Justice Kennedy’s SCOTUS blathering and won’t be surprised if other states copy follow suit:
The 8th Circuit’s decision to uphold the South Dakota law, even though it compels doctors to say things they don’t believe, is in part the fault of Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his 2007 decision banning a method of late-term abortion, Kennedy worried a lot about women who regret having abortions. With paternalistic abandon, he wrote about their “distress” in terms of their “lack of information” about abortion. Kennedy was talking, in graphic specifics, about lack of information on the way a so-called partial-birth abortion unfolds. Whether or not he’s right, these details have nothing to do with philosophical musings about whether the fetus is a human being. But that didn’t stop the 8th Circuit from quoting him at length in the very different context of the South Dakota law.
The fraught claim that abortion harms women, which I’ve written about before, was languishing in legal Nowheresville until Kennedy unexpectedly raised it up and blessed it. Now that notion, and the small minority of women who attest to it, are a handy new tool for abortion opponents. The 8th Circuit includes six other states—Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Laws that compel doctors’ speech, as this one does, would now be legal in all those places, should state legislators adopt them. And if states in other regions want to try passing such laws, they’ll have a great precedent to cite to the other circuit courts.
Also from Slate William Saletan weighed in on fetal separation, then wound up talking birth control again. Jessica@Feministing points to the AP story, the Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota statement — “We remain optimistic that, in time, the court will find that the law is unconstitutional,” says PPMNS President and CEO Sarah Stoesz — and Get Involved page, and her co-blogger Ann on the politics of “informed consent.”