South Dakota's zealous anti-abortion measure is alarming

South Dakota is the latest flashpoint in the battle over abortion — and what's happening there reveals a lot about the extreme viewpoint of some abortion foes. The bill the South Dakota Legislature has put before Gov. Mike Rounds would outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. The only health exception would be to save a woman's life. Performing an abortion would become a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.

Even if the Republican governor signs the bill, something Rounds has suggested he will probably do, it's highly unlikely that the legislation would survive a court challenge. Certainly it wouldn't under previous U.S. Supreme Court rulings. But anti-abortion forces just as clearly hope the legislation will trigger a reconstituted high court to revisit this issue, particularly if President Bush gets to appoint another justice in the time it takes for the matter to wend its way upward.

Regardless of the bill's ultimate fate, however, the ideology behind it is instructive.

In a telephone interview Thursday, I asked South Dakota State Rep. Roger Hunt, primary sponsor of the ban, why his legislation didn't include an exemption for women who became pregnant after rape or incest. Hunt contended that it did: Women could use emergency contraception in the interval between the rape or incestuous sexual encounter and the time that medical tests first confirm a pregnancy, a period he estimated at three to seven days. But once a woman discovers she is pregnant, Hunt said, the fetus must be protected.

"If there is a rape, it really is an injustice to that woman," he said. "But there are remedies for that woman. The perpetrator can be prosecuted. Family, friends, pregnancy-crisis centers are all there to help her, as well as adoption procedures to assist her. But the unborn child whose life is terminated has no remedy."

It doesn't matter to Hunt that such a fetus would be at a very early stage of development. A South Dakota legislative task force has determined that life begins at conception, the Republican state representative explained.

"Whether it is a few days or a few months, you have life," Hunt said. "If there is life, now we are talking about balancing a woman's right to choose and the life of the unborn child."

Balancing? Hunt and the South Dakota Legislature have made it crystal clear that they put the interests of a fetus at any stage of development over those of a pregnant woman or girl, even if she happens to be a victim of rape or incest. Nor do any health concerns beyond those "designed or intended to prevent the death" of the woman matter to them.