return to back alley butchery

The State Legislature of South Dakota has just approved a bill to ban most abortions. The goal is to trigger a legal battle over the 1973 Roe-v-Wade ruling, in which the US Supreme Court established that governments lacked the power to prohibit abortions.

The bill calls for jail sentences of five years for doctors who perform abortions, even in cases where the woman has been raped, her health is threatened, or she became pregnant in an incestuous relationship.

Every year, around the world, over 200,000 women die of unsafe, back-alley abortions. Obviously, the fundamentalist Christians who sponsored this bill don't place women's lives on a par with fetus lives. Or the lives of the 5 million Iraqi children who died every month under US-led sanctions on a par with the hypothetical lives of unborn Americans.