Rory King: Amendment G about enshrining right to abortion in constitution

The abortion amendment, Amendment G, the promotion of which is significantly funded by out-of-state abortion money, is a disaster for women, unborn babies and South Dakota. It enshrines abortion as a constitutional right under our state constitution.

I would ask the voters to consider the following:

Rory King, guest columnist

1. Because it’s an amendment of the constitution, it’s “carved in stone.” It takes away the power of citizens to change the law through the legislative process. It not only reinstates Roe v. Wade, and its line of cases, which allowed abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy, but it’s even more extreme. It takes away the power of our State Legislature to protect the health of women.
2. It takes away the power of the people’s representatives from in any way regulating or preventing abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, and 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester.
3. Because it prohibits the Legislature from regulating abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, it prevents our elected representatives from protecting the health and safety of the mother, from assuring that parents are involved in the abortion decisions of their teen daughters, from enacting safeguards on how abortion is carried out, from preventing coerced abortions, from requiring that the mother be given information about fetal development, from requiring the doctor providing the abortion be on the staff of a local hospital and many other protections.
4. It endangers women’s lives by dropping health and safety requirements for abortion and overturns common sense laws to protect women and girls from enforced abortions.
5. It takes away the power of the Legislature to prohibit painful, late-term abortions of healthy, viable babies during the second trimester.

1. It allows the Legislature to prohibit third-trimester abortions only if, in the medical judgment of the woman’s physician, it’s necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. “Health” includes any health reason, no matter how minor, including emotional, psychological and familial factors — and the medical judgment of the woman’s physician is almost always that of the abortionist.
2. It even prevents the Legislature from prohibiting “partial-birth abortion,” a particularly grisly late-term procedure with which the baby is partially born (either the head or the body is outside the womb) and killed during birth.
3. We have spent more than 50 years attempting to overturn the decision that enshrined abortion rights in our U.S. Constitution. Amendment G reverses all that effort. It enshrines the right to abortion in our state constitution, resulting in the death of unborn babies, endangering the lives and health of women, and turning our culture into one of death and nihilism.

Amendment G is an effort by radical abortion advocates to enshrine in our constitution a right to abortion that’s more extreme than the abortion rights provided by the Roe v. Wade line of cases. These are the same people who try to convince us that they are fighting for “reproductive rights” when they are really promoting an “end to reproduction” — by the willful destruction of a human being at an early stage of development. They’re the same people who try to convince our young people that sex is a recreational activity.

Young women are the biggest victims of this movement aside, of course, from unborn babies. By talk of “reproductive rights,” they are lulled into using abortion as a backup in the event contraception fails. They’re lulled into forgetting that abortion takes the life of a human being. In fact, that is the goal of the entire abortion rights movement — to anesthetize the culture to the fact that abortion takes the life of a human being.

Guest columnist Rory King is an Aberdeen resident and attorney. He’s a U.S. Army Reserve veteran and graduate of the University of South Dakota School of Law. His opinions do not represent the law firm for which he works.