Don't turn back clock on abortion

We've heard a lot this campaign cycle about Democrats making this a "national election." About Republicans' incompetent mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the administration's continued dishonesty about Iraq and now the arrogance of leadership highlighted by the Mark Foley affair. We've heard weekly horse-race updates about who will control Congress in January.

What we haven't heard much about is abortion.

But this election cycle, we also face a national right-wing effort to turn the clock back on abortion, using the same brew of bad science, misleading "facts" and paternalistic attitudes toward Americans -- in this case, women -- that we've seen for the past five years.

South Dakota, where earlier this year the Legislature passed an abortion ban so restrictive it makes even pre-Roe v. Wade laws seem enlightened, is the epicenter of this effort. The law provides no exceptions: not for rape, not for incest, not in cases of severe fetal abnormality, not even to protect the woman's health. Doctors can be charged with a felony and be sentenced to five years in prison just for doing what medical training and ethics demand of them: referring a woman for a health-saving abortion.

A broad coalition of South Dakotans have forced the ban onto the November ballot and, despite an ocean of right-wing money pouring in, are within striking distance of overturning it. Organizers supporting the ban have made their case using antiquated ideas about women and flat-out lies about science and medicine. They ignore every scientific consensus to argue that abortion causes abnormal rates of breast cancer, depression and even suicidal thoughts.

More frightening is the foundation on which they base those arguments: Women, they say, are incapable of making a rational decision to terminate a pregnancy, because it is in women's "nature" to care for children. Anti-abortion laws, therefore, are "protecting women's rights" from predatory husbands, boyfriends and abortion providers. Anti-abortion activists hope to use this rhetorical frame to "take back" the words "freedom" and "choice," and with them more than a century of struggle to establish women as capable of making our own moral choices.

The worst mistake progressives can make is to assume either that this terrible law will fall of its own weight, or that it is an isolated case that needn't worry the rest of us. More than a dozen other state legislatures, including Ohio and Missouri, have similarly draconian legislation pending.

The South Dakota law, if enacted, would be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And as many as 29 state legislatures are prepared to pass blanket abortion bans as soon as Roe is repealed. It is no longer clear that a majority of justices will protect a woman's right to choose; and before we get too excited about the prospects for change this November, recall that President Bush still has two more years to appoint judges.

Many people in South Dakota, including some who are pro-life, feel something ugly and extreme was foisted on them by their Legislature -- and may well respond by joining hands to kill this legislation.

Rejecting this draconian law won't be the end of the fight to protect women's dignity and women's rights. But failure to overturn it will make that fight -- and the lives of women in South Dakota and across our nation -- enormously more difficult.

Kate Michelman is former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and author of "With Liberty and Justice for All: A Life Protecting the Right to Choose."

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