Leslee is one happy gal. Happy as in "Here's your winning lottery ticket" happy. As in "You've won the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes" kind of happy. Or even "Today's my lucky day" happy.
Come meet Leslee and find out how happy she is.
"I'm ecstatic," said Leslee Unruh, an antiabortion activist in South Dakota. "It's like someone gave me $1 million and told me, 'Leslee, go shopping.' That's how I feel."
Unruh says she wants to ban abortion precisely to protect women's freedom. So women are truly free when they have no right to choose. How deceptively simple.
Unruh is also the prime mover of South Dakota's abstinence only education movement. I imagine abstinence-only education's poor track record isn't much of an issue here. Unruh's Abstinence Clearinghouse features a signature event--Purity Balls.
Digby:
You have to see it to believe it. They are all dressed up like prom goers, the dads in tuxes and the daughters in evening gowns looking all grown up. They dance, they laugh, they giggle. And then father and daughter stand up, holding each others hands, staring into each others' eyes and the girls make these vows as if in a wedding ceremony....
You will notice that there's no "mother-son" ceremony in which boys pledge to their mothers to stay pure until they give themselves as a gift to their wives. There is a Victorian impulse at work here that has nothing to do with fetuses. This is about women being autonomous, independent, sexual humans.
But hey, at least they're free, according to Unruh. But the icing on the cake is that the SCOTUS decision has opened it up to the states so the anti-abortion groups have multiple fronts to fight for their agenda:
We're moving beyond putting roadblocks in front of abortions to actually prohibiting them," said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, a national antiabortion group based in Wichita, Kan. "This swings the door wide open."
He and other strategists said they hoped to introduce legislation in a number of states that would:
• Ban all abortions of viable fetuses, unless the mother's life is endangered.
• Ban mid- and late-term abortion for fetal abnormality, such as Down syndrome or a malformed brain.
• Require doctors to tell patients in explicit detail what the abortion will involve, show them ultrasound images of the fetus and warn them that they may become suicidal after the procedure.
• Lengthen waiting periods so that women must reflect on such counseling for several days before obtaining the abortion.
It is far from certain that the Supreme Court would uphold all those proposals. But antiabortion activists clearly think momentum is on their side.
That's the goal of Leslee Unruh and her friends: Making women free by giving them second-class status.
(H/T Digby)