Friday, March 17, 2006

Considering South Dakota

A couple of summers ago, my husband suggested another step in my continuing education in Americana.  We’d drive right across the mid West, thereby exposing me to iconic elements of the American aesthetic:  the Road Trip, tallgrass prairie, bison, and Mount Rushmore.

To pass the hours on the interstate, my husband taught me games he’d played on childhood road trips.  We spotted state license plates, from “Amber Waves of Grain,” and “Land of Lincoln,” across the Show-Me state, up to the Rough Rider state, and thence “Back Home Again Indiana.” And we collected bumper sticker wisdom:  “If you can read this, you’re driving too close,” “My child beat up your honour student.” There’s whole folk philosophy to be gleaned from such one-liners, we mused.

From St. Louis, we passed Kansas City, then north into Nebraska, to roll westward along the beguiling valley of the Niobrara river, misted with purple loosestrife.  We struck north through the weird mauve and burnt sienna landscape of South Dakota’s Bad Lands.  By chance, our trip coincided with the Sturgis rally, so the Black Hills were buzzing with free-spirited Harley-Davidsons.  Burly bikers mugged for snapshots on the Grandview Terrace, their ice-cream cones dripping, under the stony, presidential gazes of Mount Rushmore.

This, then, is what I know of South Dakota.  Against this tourist backdrop of gigantic male heads, I now picture Governor Mike Rounds last week signing into law a bill that restricts women’s access to abortion to cases where the pregnant woman’s life is in danger.  The legislation is as implacable as those stony faces: Not even a frightened teen who was raped by her uncle will be eligible for an abortion in South Dakota now.  The law is at least consistent:  it assumes that from the moment of conception, there’s a new something with the same rights as any other person.  If that’s what you think, then it doesn’t make sense to make an exception for rape:  why kill that womb-dwelling person for the sins of its father?

There are a couple of problems here.  The majority of Americans, wherever they stand on the morality of abortion, are inclined to think that the law should at least allow the termination of a pregnancy due to rape.  Also, the South Dakota law clashes with the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, in Roe v. Wade.  But that’s the point, with two new, more conservative justices appointed to the Court, pro-life activists see an opportunity to challenge that ruling.

At this point, it’s tempting for this essayist to bail out.  There’s nothing new to be said on the topic; you can tour the whole debate in any parking lot.  There on the bumper stickers are the familiar positions:  “Abortion stops a beating heart,” “Be grateful your mother chose life,” and, albeit rarely in this part of the world, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one.” We all already know where we stand on abortion, nothing ever changes, why re-visit such familiar ground one more time?

For one thing, it’s getting harder to get the facts relevant to moral decision-making.  The current administration has deliberately blurred the bounds between medical science and politics, between facts and values.  So it’s not surprising that Indiana legislators, for example, have recently considered a bill requiring medical doctors to tell women seeking abortions that life begins at conception, as if the description of a biological process itself settled the moral or religious question.

For another thing, we need to get beyond the bumper stickers.  Figuring out the right relation between law and morality takes more than a throaty shout of “One Nation Under God” or “Get Your Laws Off My Body.” Roe v. Wade draws a boundary around reproductive choice - not just abortion - to protect some private matters from regulation by the state.  If South Dakota is the bellwether, we should get used to legislators regulating our morals:  we should expect less access to contraceptives and permissible forms of fertility treatments, too.

As I think of those free-spirited bikers blazing across the wide open spaces, it’s hard for me to believe that this is what Americans really want.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on March 17, 2006
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