SIOUX FALLS (LifeSiteNews) — South Dakota Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed a trio of new pro-life laws on Friday, including a crackdown on abortion pills, a clarification of how existing law treats medical emergencies, and a requirement to educate school children about fetal development.
South Dakota law criminalizes any surgical or chemical abortion “unless there is appropriate and reasonable medical judgment that performance of an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of the pregnant female.” Abortion is never actually necessary to protect a woman’s life or health, but pro-abortion detractors have claimed the law’s language would still forbid doctors from treating several medical complications that could endanger the lives of pregnant women.
Pro-lifers have long rejected such claims, but to resolve any lingering confusion, HB 1257 amends the law to clarify that its definition of “abortion” does not include “Medical treatment that is provided to a pregnant female and results in the accidental or unintentional death of the unborn child”; “Treatment to resolve a miscarriage”; “The treatment or removal of an ectopic pregnancy”; “The removal from the uterus of a deceased unborn child”; or “Any medical procedure performed for the purpose of saving the life or preserving the health of the unborn child.” It also adds a definition of “miscarriage” as the “spontaneous loss of a pregnancy.”
The second piece of legislation, HB 1274, makes it a class 6 felony to “knowingly dispense, distribute, sell, or advertise” abortion drugs, to crack down on the mail distribution of abortion pills to undermine the state’s pro-life laws. Its passage follows the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office securing a settlement with New York-based activist group “Mayday Health” to stop advertising abortion pills in the state.
Abortion pills have become arguably the abortion lobby’s most important tool for perpetuating abortion-on-demand and undermining pro-life laws, especially distributing them by mail across state lines, which is extremely difficult for pro-life states to prevent.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s Prof. Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
“South Dakota is the most pro-life state in America. Our laws reflect the fact that an unborn child is a person – and that child is worthy of our protection and respect,” Rhoden declared. “By stopping illegal abortion pills from coming into South Dakota, we continue to stand for life and protect the next generation of South Dakotans.”
The third bill, HB 1313, requires public schools to adopt “age-appropriate and research-based instruction in prenatal human growth and development” in science and health classes, specifically including a “high-definition ultrasound video that shows the presence of the brain, heart, and other major organs as they appear at various stages of prenatal development”; and a “high-quality, computer-generated rendering or animation, or a high-definition ultrasound video that shows the progress of prenatal human development from fertilization through birth, noting significant moments in the progress of cellular growth and organ development,” such as Live Action’s Baby Olivia project.
Thirteen states ban all or most abortions, with a wide range of lesser restrictions also in effect. But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states refuges for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.
Long-settled biological criteria and mainstream medical textbooks recognize that a living human being, structurally and genetically distinct from his or her mother, is created upon fertilization and is present throughout the entirety of pregnancy – regardless of whether that embryonic human is being artificially sustained outside of the womb.
This is not in serious dispute; in 2019, University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development graduate Steve Jacobs found that 96 percent of more than 5,500 biologists he surveyed agreed, despite overwhelmingly identifying as “liberal,” “pro-choice,” and Democrats, and a majority identifying as “non-religious.”
However, over the past decade, Gallup, Pew, and Marist have all found attitudes on abortion trending in an overall more “pro-choice” direction, prompting frustration and division among pro-life activists and Republican lawmakers over a proper strategic direction and the political expediency of candidates taking a clear pro-life stand. Making it standard practice to give public school students a clear understanding that the preborn are living human children early in their development has significant potential to change that and to teach the next generation of Americans to better recognize exactly who it is that abortion destroys.
“If you believe a life is a life, and I do, it’s not indoctrination to let others know that,” the governor told reporters at a signing ceremony at Alpha pregnancy resource center in Sioux Falls.
