When lawmakers enacted the near-total ban, South Dakotans began clamoring for petitions that will bring the question to voters this year.
Yet for combatants and endangered bystanders in the Great American Culture War, South Dakota has made itself a bellwether. A ballot question here is providing a preview of what might ensue in Minnesota and around the country, if (or is it when?) the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its landmark 1973 abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade.
Abortion foes in this state have been more than mildly surprised by what developed within days of their enactment last March of a near-total ban on abortion.
Defying the Roe ruling -- and inviting the high court to change it -- the South Dakota Legislature passed a bill that would make abortion a felony offense, except when the procedure is necessary to prevent the death of the mother. Lawmakers in both parties supported the ban -- in an election year. They evidently believed polls that pegged South Dakotans as some of the most ardent opponents of legal abortion in the country.
What happened next, said former GOP legislator and retired educator Jan Nicolay of Chester, was "just amazing ... I've never, ever seen anything like it."
South Dakota allows voters to petition to "refer" legislative actions to the general election ballot, so they can be invalidated before going into effect. Referral is rarely used. Yet it's what South Dakotans began clamoring for, even before the ink was dry on GOP Gov. Michael Rounds' signature on the bill.
"People started calling, asking me for petitions," Nicolay said. "They'd stop me wherever I went, the grocery store, or while I was buying flowers to plant, and ask where they could get petitions."
Nicolay soon found herself the cochair of a coalition of feminist and progressive groups that called itself the Campaign for Healthy Families. By May, it was a group with 1,200 petition-carrying volunteers -- all unpaid. By June, well before the deadline, they delivered more than twice the required 16,728 signatures to the secretary of state's office.
It would be a long stretch to claim that, when abortion was outlawed, South Dakotans suddenly found their inner feminists. What rankled folks wasn't that lawmakers wanted to deprive women of control over their own bodies, observed Planned Parenthood's Kate Looby.
Instead, it was that lawmakers showed no pity for women impregnated by acts of rape or incest, or for those whose health would be adversely affected by pregnancy and childbearing. Some people also objected to the use of their state tax dollars on a legal errand for the national right-to-life movement.
Looby, whose bunker-like Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls is the only abortion provider in the state, believes the "prolife" label masks the shades of gray in South Dakotans' opinions. "There are many moderates on this issue," she said. "They say, this [all-out ban] goes too far."
The Campaign for Healthy Families has set out to gel those moderates into a political force that can defeat their formidable opposite number, Vote Yes for Life. For veteran abortion rights defenders, it's a rush into uncharted territory.
"We are writing the textbook" on running a grass-roots campaign to keep abortion legal, Looby said. "We've always filed lawsuits before. We have a comfort level with that. This is new for us."
New, and overdue. For 33 years, while feminists clung to Justice Harry Blackmun's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, abortion opponents have been organizing. They've been fearless (and, at times, tasteless) about taking their cause into the public square. They've become masters at networking, fundraising and turning out the vote.
In short, they understood democracy, better than the feminists did. Their payoff is plain today in Pierre and St. Paul and Washington, D.C., where abortion-opposing Republicans are in charge.
House GOP Speaker Steve Sviggum is among the Minnesota Republicans who welcome the battle across the state line.
"It spills over the border in a positive way for Republicans," he said, noting that southwestern Minnesotans get their news from Sioux Falls.
Keeping abortion uppermost in voters' minds will help Republican legislative candidates, he predicted.
But Sviggum should be careful what he wishes for. In South Dakota, where the majority GOP officially favors an all-out abortion ban and minority Democrats are officially neutral on the subject, this year has already seen three defections to the Dems among legislative candidates. The Democratic Party is fielding more candidates for the statehouse than it has in years.
"This has awakened the Democratic Party in this state," said Sioux Falls Argus Leader political columnist David Kranz.
That new vitality might not last until November. But if it does, American abortion politics won't be the same.
Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.
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