blog4choice

Ignore the man behind the curtain

Remember the Wizard of Oz moment when Dorothy and friends are in the great hall in Oz and the curtain opens behind the wizard? He sees them and then turns back to his microphone and says "Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain" or some such thing? As Ellen Goodman says, the curtain is now drawn on the pretense of anti-choicers only wanting to legislate to "help families communicate" and to "give women complete information".

The state of SD has finally made the upfront statement that all abortions should stop (except, of course those that save the life of a woman, or those for really religious virgins who have been brutally raped).

ELLEN GOODMAN
In South Dakota, at least the pretense is finally over
By Ellen Goodman | March 10, 2006

TWO MONTHS AGO, when all eyes were on Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, I traveled 1,300 miles west to Sioux Falls, S.D. I went to see the state where the right to abortion had already come down to this: one clinic, one day a week, one doctor. The women in the waiting room had come from all over the state. The doctor had flown in from Minneapolis.

South Dakota had become a legislative laboratory for abortion restrictions. It had followed the blueprint that Alito himself had laid out in the 1980s. This was a strategy to add so many restrictions -- one law at a time -- that Roe v. Wade would collapse without ever being overturned.

As Kate Looby, the head of the state Planned Parenthood, said that day, we could end up with a hollow right to abortion that would mean nothing to the women of South Dakota.

Now Alito is on the bench and abortion opponents believe, in the words of South Dakota state legislator Roger Hunt, ''This is our time." The ''purists" are in charge now. All the pretense is gone. And the laboratory door has closed with a bang. Or, to put it more accurately, a ban. . . .

Read the rest of Ellen's most excellent take on it here .

posted by RevDeb @ 7:57 AM