South Dakota lawmakers just committed a historic overreach by banning abortion, and the extremity of their law is likely to set back the pro-life movement decades in the court of public opinion. As frightful as Governor Mike Rounds' signature of this bill is to those who favor reproductive choice, it could easily be the high-profile wake-up call needed for those who have taken abortion rights for granted....including those in South Dakota who now realize that their teenage daughter has to carry around (and then deliver) her rapist's spawn.
South Dakotans are not as big of wingnuts as the actions of their elected officials would indicate. SUSA's poll last year indicated South Dakota voters were evenly divided in identifying themselves as pro-choice or pro-life. And it's always much easier identifying one's self as "pro-life" when the question is an abstract hypothetical. Now that the prospect of an abortion prohibition is a real possibility, I suspect some soft pro-lifers will have a change of heart, particularly given the unimaginable extremity of this specific bill, which really puts the endgame of the "pro-life movement" on display for the world.
Ultimately, Mike Rounds and a whole litany of otherwise "safe" South Dakota state lawmakers may have made themselves (and possibly a bunch of others with an (R) behind their names) vulnerable this November because of this obscene overreach. And this issue has only just begun. South Dakota will be embarrassed in the national headlines for months, watching its limited public resources be wasted on a futile national court fight. South Dakota's lackluster public schools and Third World-quality highways will receive even less funding than usual this year because so much will be squandered on the Rapists' Reproductive Rights Protection Act.
While it's unfortunate things have to go this far before rational people take notice, I'm confident that my neighbors to the west will give several of the wingnuts currently representing them the Dover School Board treatment. Next November 8, don't be surprised if Pat Robertson is prophesizing buffalo stampedes and 100 years of Dust Bowls upon "God-less" South Dakotans.