The South Dakota Curveball

Alexandra Walker

March 27, 2006

Last week, Paul Waldman made a persuasive—and, for many, counterintuitive—argument on TomPaine.com about how South Dakota's abortion ban backs Republicans, especially 2008 presidential hopefuls, into a corner on reproductive rights. A piece published over the weekend in The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed anti-choice conservative activists who conceded that the retrograde South Dakota law is pitting the Republican pragmatists against the zealots (my word, not theirs).

Waldman was among the first to argue that a law such as South Dakota's, which bans all abortions, except for those where the mother's life is at risk, "opens the very debate on reproductive rights that Republicans don't want to have"  about whether all abortion should be illegal. The Inquirer's Dick Polman wrote  that conservatives he talked to "acknowledge that the issue is dicey:"

In the words of Jeffrey Bell, a veteran Washington activist who has worked with religious conservatives, "This is a real curveball that people weren't expecting. I'd understand if strategists might not want their [GOP] clients to say, 'Yeah, South Dakota, bring it on!' They don't know whether the public has moved that far."

Jack Pitney, a former national Republican official and Capitol Hill staffer who closely tracks GOP politics, said the other day: "This [abortion law] is a delicate situation for the Republicans. It makes a lot of them nervous. It's one thing to just talk about banning abortion - and they do that all the time, because it's a great way to fire up the base and raise money. But it's another thing to actually ban abortion nationwide.

"Because that would raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions that could hurt the party politically - such as, if this is truly a crime, whom do you jail? Very few Republican candidates want to answer that question."

Polman, like Waldman, noted the deafening Democratic silence over South Dakota's self-proclaimed "frontal assault" on Roe. The extremists in the Republican Party have just handed pro-choice Democrats a fairly black-and-white issue which they could be using to make their case for the importance of legal abortion. And, if they were smart, they would make a very prominent, public stand against the law, arguing that criminalizing abortion will not end abortions. Smart Democrats would pick up on research like that recently explained on TomPaine.com by the Guttmacher Institute's Cynthia Dailard. She wrote:

... restrictions may make abortions harder to obtain, they do not reduce the underlying demand for abortion. The reason for this is simple: behind almost every one of the 1.3 million annual abortions in this country is an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.  The United States has a comparatively high abortion rate because it has a high unintended pregnancy rate—one of the highest among industrialized nations.  States wishing to reduce their abortion rates would do far better to devote the necessary resources to help women obtain contraceptives and use them effectively over time—particularly low-income women who are most likely to experience an unintended pregnancy.

Smart Democrats would assail South Dakota for grandstanding while actually doing nothing to end the primary cause of abortion—unintended pregnancy. That would be framing the debate in a way that aligns the Democrats with proactive measures to reduce abortion, while affirming their commitment to safe, legal abortion. It would not only be pragmatic, it would be principled.