...or so Governor Dennis Daugaard seems to be saying by signing HB 1237, the "Women can't think on weekends" law... today... on International Women's Day.

Jennifer Aulwes of Planned Parenthood aptly captures the Governor's and South Dakota's moral failing:

Today Governor Daugaard signed into law a longer waiting period for abortion, once again proving the state’s hostility to women’s health and partiality to Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which are known for misleading and coercing women.

We are very disappointed that the state is further burdening women with medically unnecessary waiting periods for abortion. We will continue to stand with the women of South Dakota and fight for their access to safe and legal abortion, should they need to consider it.

These decisions that women and families are faced with are deeply personal and complex. Politicians have no place interfering with the personal medical decisions of women and families [Jennifer Aulwes, Planned Parenthood MN-ND-SD, press release,  2013.03.08].

Woe unto my wife and daughter, viewed by a patriarchal majority in Pierre as moral incompetents and objects of control.

Ladies, tell me there's some way you could stage a Lysistrata-style boycott to put a stop to South Dakota's legislative abuse of women.

Expect the abortion banners to wage a hard campaign in District 31 in 2014. The Republican Representatives from Lawrence County, Fred Romkema and Tim Johns, once again demonstrated their good sense by voting against House Bill 1237, Rep. Jon Hansen's mean dig against the rights and sensibilities of women older than he to make their own health care decisions.

The anti-abortion grandstanders screamed deceitful "pro-abortion!" propaganda to defeat District 31's former Senator Tom Nelson last year. Romkema and Johns both seem smart and confident enough to ignore such hysteria.

But until we get some Democrats to run in Lawrence County, ladies and friends of ladies, it wouldn't hurt to give Rep. Romkema and Rep. Johns a call and thank them for their support.

Rep. Kristi Noem hasn't thrown her support behind the Violence Against Women Act that passed the Senate with bipartisan support last week. But she has signed on as a co-sponsor to a measure to take away funding from women's health care. Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) has filed HR 217, which takes another stab at defunding Planned Parenthood and any other entity that performs abortions. HR 217 exempts hospitals and entities performing abortions in cases of rape, incest, and risk of death of the mother.

Planned Parenthood received $542 million in public support last year, including all federal, state, and local money. That's 45% of the organization's revenue. Here's the breakdown of the services Planned Parenthood provides:

Abortions make up 3% of the services Planned Parenthood provides, just as when Ezra Klein reported on this issue last year. According to the latest annual report, in 2011, Planned Parenthood provided nearly eleven million services to about three million patients over nearly five million clinic visits. By the numbers, Planned Parenthood provided...

• 4,475,013 STI/STD tests and treatments for women and men,
• 3,436,813 contraceptive services (including 3,575 vasectomy clients),
• 1,307,570 cancer tests and preventive treatments,
• 1,150,589 pregnancy tests,
• 28,674 prenatal services,
• 333,964 abortions, and
• 132,036 other services.

HR 217 only takes away Title X money, which is dedicated to family planning and preventive health services and which by law cannot be used for abortions. The bill would not reduce the number of abortions; it would take cancer screenings, STD testing and contraception away from poor people and would lead to more unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

Like Senator John Thune and other Republicans, Rep. Noem is thus willing to take away useful non-abortion health services to score political points on her desire to infringe on women's constitutional right to abortion.

Rep. Noem will be in Sioux Falls Tuesday noon at the VFW on South Minnesota. If you get the chance, you might want to ask her why she wants to do more harm than good for women.

Gordon Howie turns on his webcam and lets Pastor Ron Burtz of Wall ramble about the supernatural, miracles, and conversion:

Some guys on a boat deciding to pray after a long sea voyage is far from a miracle. The "Great Awakening" of 1858 to which Pastor Burtz refers is no more supernatural than the decline in religion that preceded it. It's all perfectly explicable by natural, cultural forces.

Let's see some real miracles. Let's see Rep. Rev. Scott Craig get back to first principles, put his faith in the Lord, and withdraw his "I want to be a hero with my gun!" legislation that would put more guns near our children.

Let's see Rep. Jon Hansen decide he doesn't need to bully and insult every woman in South Dakota to prove his manhood. Or let's see him really man up and propose legislation to simply imprison women for seeking an abortion instead of fiddling with sneaky lies and legal tricks to take away their constitutional rights.

Let's see Rep. Brian Gosch, who in yesterday's House Judiciary committee declared Rep. Peggy Gibson's question about the out-of-state activism behind pending abortion legislation as not germane, apply that same stricture to legislation about animal cruelty, which Senate Ag and Natural Resources killed on trumped-up charges of that bills out-of-state origins.

And let's see the voters of South Dakota pay attention to the amount of time the majority party in Pierre spends embarrassing our state with discussion of lunatic fringe policies, delaying the big fiscal decisions on schools and roads to the end of the session when they can rush their favors and failures through without public input. Let's see the voters of South Dakota replace posers like Scott Craig and Jon Hansen and Jim Stalzer and Jenna Haggar and Ernie Otten with real problem-solvers.

Miracles like those just might get me to go to church... or at least shout a hearty Hallelujah.

Happy Valentine's Day, ladies: just as I warned, out-of-state activist Harold Cassidy is back, sticking his nose in South Dakota women's business. But since he's working for the "family-values" wing of the GOP to continue their treatment of women as property and nincompoops, he gets a free pass from the powers that be to meddle in our politics.

David Montgomery gets Cassidy's take on House Bill 1237, Rep. Jon Hansen's mean-spirited effort to make South Dakota's 72-wiating period for abortions even longer:

Harold Cassidy, a lawyer representing two crisis pregnancy centers who are defending the 2011 abortion law in court, said HB1237 is not about giving the woman time to reflect on her own — which she could do on a weekend or holiday — but to seek out counseling, which might be closed then.

“One of the other purposes (of the bill) is to provide the woman with the opportunity to seek out counseling from other persons or individuals within the pregnant mother’s natural support system, such as the woman’s regular care physician, who’s never going to be open on a Saturday or a Sunday, or such as a clergy member,” Cassidy said [David Montgomery, "S.D. Legislature: Abortion Waiting Period May Get Longer," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.02.14].

Provide women with an opportunity... that phrase ought to set off your B.S. meters. HB 1237 takes away opportunities for women to seek medical care at the times that work for them, their families, and their employers. Women already have the opportunity to seek such counseling from the people in their lives. If they want to go see their regular doctors, they will. If they want more time to talk to family, friends, and clergy, they'll take that time. They don't need Harold Cassidy or Jon Hansen to legislate that time for them.

Cassidy claims that by offering abortion consultations on Fridays so women can get their state-mandated "counseling" on the weekend and schedule their abortions for Mondays, Planned Parenthood is trying to "frustrate the woman’s efforts to require the counseling that she needs and that’s required."

But that's also baloney. Read the law establishing the 72-hour waiting period that Rep. Hansen is trying to extend by not counting weekends and holidays. SDCL 34-23A-56 says that a woman seeking an abortion in South Dakota "must have a consultation at a pregnancy help center." I don't see in that statute or any of the associated statutes passed in 2011 with the 72-hour waiting period an exception that says a woman can skip the PHC propaganda session. No PHC consultation, no abortion.

Even if a woman comes to Planned Parenthood Friday for a consultation, can't get into a PHC over the weekend, then lies on the written statement she has to provide to the doctor saying, "Yup, I visited a PHC to be harangued over exercising my constitutional right to bodily autonomy," the doctor can't perform the abortion without facing the possibility of a $10,000 civil penalty.

And since the existing abortion-harassment statute specifically exempts pregnancy health centers from "any duties or liability," Leslee Unruh and South Dakota's other anti-abortion propagandists already hold the fate of women seeking abortions in their hands. If the PHCs don't want to be open on Saturday and Sunday, they don't have to be. The PHCs already have the practical authority, unchecked by state law, to extend a woman's waiting period for a legal abortion indefinitely.

The PHCs don't need HB 1237. Its supporters can achieve their nasty goals entirely under existing statute. Real conservatives should read that line and vote an easy Nay. But real conservatives should also keep government out of women's vaginas.

The pious pro-life preening begins in front of House Judiciary tomorrow morning (Friday, Feb. 15), 10:00 a.m. CST.

Senate Bill 171 was killed in committee yesterday, largely because of false claims by the Big Ag lobby that the sensible effort to make wanton animal cruelty a felony was coming from out-of-state activists.

Funny, the out-of-state activism of New Jersey lawyer Harold Cassidy has never stopped the South Dakota Legislature from passing the abortion restrictions he writes and lobbies for around the country.

House Bill 1237, this year's mean-spirited attempt to degrade and punish women even more for exercising their constitutional right to bodily autonomy, and the sneakier HB 1236, taking away one more bit of legal recourse women might have for being denied an abortion, may have Cassidy's fingerprints on them. But South Dakota Republican John Tsitrian says HB 1237 is absurd:

The absurdity built into this bill is the implication that women can’t think on weekends and holidays–the reality, of course, is to add another hurdle along the way for women who seek to terminate their unwanted pregnancies.  The simple political math is that when you add the absurdity to the problem, your sum is all about the reason that the GOP has lost a substantial share of the female vote [John Tsitrian, "News Flash: SD Women Can Think on Weekends," A Way to Go, 2013.02.12].

Tsitrian plays Bobby Jindal and urges the SDGOP to stop being the stupid party... and the mean party... and the hypocritical party:

Unhappily for the GOP, bills like South Dakota’s HB 1237 are easily lifted from news wires and disseminated by national media and used as yet another example of Republican antipathy to women.  I know that many well-educated, young, single professional women are uniformly rolling their eyes at the news of this pending legislation, and it only reinforces a built-in disgust with what they perceive to be condescending and demeaning Republican attitudes toward women.  Given that the GOP’s roots go down to the bedrock principles of self-reliance and freedom from government intrusion into our personal lives, bills like HB 1237 are a rejection of what Republicanism is all about [Tsitrian, 2013.02.12].

Tsitrian is no Democratic infiltrator: he brands President Obama a "quasi-socialist." He urges his party to drop HB 1237 not just because it's bad legislation, but also because he wants Republicans to gain ground with women voters and win more elections.

But as long as uneducated twerps like Rep. Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) try to control my wife's body, that's not going to happen.

Rep. Hansen brings his HB 1237 and HB 1236 to House Judiciary on Friday, February 15, at 10:00 a.m. Contact those committee members (11 of the 13 are Republicans; 9 of the 13 are men), send them Tsitrian's article, and tell them to kill these bills, if not for the sake of women, then for the sake of the GOP.

Senator Phil Jensen (R-33/Rapid City) was threatening to bring a fetal-pain bill to ban  abortions after 20 weeks. But with the deadline for new bills passed, no such bill has appeared in the legislative hopper. Senator Jensen has decided not to push such a bill... yet:

Senator Jensen told KOTA Territory News that it wasn't the right year for the bill, stating that certain parts of the bill needed to be re-worked, including a segment that would have made an exception in the case of a medical emergency [Katy Urban, "Fetal Pain Bill on Hold," KOTA-TV, 2013.01.30].

I'd like to think that Senator Johnson took to heart the tragedy that befell Savita Halappanavar at the hands of Ireland's strict anti-abortion laws. I'd like to think Senator Jensen has recognized that the "science" behind his plan is dubious at best.

But maybe he's just too busy fighting flouride and public education. Whatever the case, let's just be glad we won't be debating the false construct of fetal pain  in this session.

The South Dakota Legislature has already done almost all it legally can to make getting an abortion harder here than anywhere else in the country. To make any further splash on the anti-abortion crusade radar, our legislators now must resort to blatant and petty meanness.

Current South Dakota law punishes a woman for seeking an abortion by forcing her to wait 72 hours between the time she asks a doctor to perform an abortion and the time the doctor can legally perform said abortion. During that time, the state further punishes the woman by forcing her to an anti-abortion crusader's clinic to hear rank lies and propaganda.

Since South Dakota has just one abortion provider, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota's abortion restrictions effectively require women seeking abortions to miss at least a couple days of work. Women who work regular jobs can minimize their costs by scheduling their abortion appointments around a weekend or a holiday. They still face the cost of lodging in Sioux Falls for three nights, but at least they save on the cost of one long drive back and forth across the state. If the woman already has children, a weekend or holiday appointment may make childcare cheaper, since she may have more relatives or friends who have time off to care for her kids while she's away on her unpleasant trip.

Rep. Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) says nuts to that. He and several other outright mean Republicans offer House Bill 1237, which says that no weekend or holiday may count in that 72-hour waiting period. By God, lady, until we overturn Roe v. Wade, if you're going to get an abortion, we're going to make you miss work. We're going to make you pay!

The South Dakota Legislature picks and chooses which parts of the Constitution to respect. They will consider a host of bills and resolutions to make the Second Amendment inviolate. But they treat the bodily autonomy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment and the equal citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth as a simple mistake to be rectified by whatever legislative tricks and lies they can come up with.