THE NUTS BEHIND SOUTH DAKOTA'S ABORTION BAN

From PBS's The News Hour via Crooks and Liars, Bill Napoli, a state senator and strong supporter of the new law, explains how "except where the life of the mother is threatened" can be liberally interpreted to include rape, incest, or threat to the mother's health:

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Click here to see the video.

Okay, obviously this guy's a total lunatic. I might have thought that he's simply stupid, but the "she was religious" thing takes him into insanity. Clearly, going on with the hypothetical pregnancy in this situation would not be threatening to the life of the mother. Extraordinarily traumatic, yes, but not life threatening. In other words, Napoli is full of shit--what makes him crazy is that he appears to really believe what he's saying. And what he's saying is a pretty clear indicator of where his mind is: bad girls can't get abortions, but good girls can, and Napoli and his ilk get to decide what "good" and "bad" mean. It's not simply about life with these people; it's about controlling sexuality. And don't get me wrong, by the way. I'm not saying the ban would be acceptable if it included the rape, incest, and health exceptions; my position is in support of what the pro-lifers call convenience abortion on demand, no questions asked. But my point about this guy's way of thinking is that the people behind this law are freakin' nuts. Not even Texas is acting this quickly--there are more than a few in the pro-life movement who believe that this SD law might backfire somehow, either because of its over-the-top brutality, or because of its hastiness. This doesn't even get into the Orwellian doublethink these people have to employ in order to stake out such bizarre political positions. I know that there are plenty of rational people who oppose abortion; ultimately, it's a pretty tangled issue, ethically speaking, but it seems that the movement has more than its fair share of absolute lunatics. Looks like a lot of them live in South Dakota.

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