KOK Edit: Your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM)
KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) Katharine O'Moore Klopf
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Monday, March 06, 2006

Back to the Dark Ages

The battle to retake complete control of women's bodies is at fever pitch in South Dakota:


South Dakota governor signs abortion ban
Nearly all operations outlawed in direct challenge to Roe v. Wade


pierre, s.d.—Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday banning nearly all abortions in South Dakota, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

The bill would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure was necessary to save the woman's life. It would make no exception for cases of rape or incest. ...


Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, urges women to leave South Dakota:


It is time. Pack it up. Strip the bed, box up the cat, load the U-Haul, call your hip friends over in Minneapolis, move out West, or East, or anywhere with a mind-set not stuck like a bloody nail in the moral coffin of 1845. Let this be your clarion call. Get the hell out, right now.

Here is why: Your state hates you. ...


It's not just South Dakota. It's all of the United States. We are returning to the Dark Ages, step by step, losing one right after another.


3 comments:

Katherine Zander said...

Excellent op-ed. Thanks for linking it.

Very scary. Last week, I officially crossed South Dakota off of my job search criteria. I can't bring my girls to a place like that.

I hope the bill's authors and supporters are up for reelection this year, and get canned just like the town's council pusing intelligent design.

One can hope.

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

I'll continue to hope, KZ, and fight the best way I know how—with words.

But what's really frightening to me is that I grew up in Texas with attitudes like those represented by the South Dakota law. I moved away, eventually ending up in New York State, to escape them. And over the years, I'd thought they'd disappeared. Instead, they seem to have mushroomed and are threatening to devour the U.S.

cafiend said...

The first impulse when the majority of the population in a place seems hostile or indifferent to things you cherish is to leave. That works for a while. The settlement of the Americas reflected the desire of European emigrants to get to a place where they had a chance to try to get to the top of a social order. It wasn't necessarily noble. But eventually their descendants ran into another ocean and had to start facing the real issues of human social justice, which they had been avoiding by running off to someplace else, treating anyone they found there as subhuman in order to license the violence and repression needed to "claim new lands" and "settle the wilderness."

It was just the last throes of evolution before self-consciousness set in thoroughly enough to breed more widespread glimmerings of a conscience. But that's been a slow process. It still has a vast long way to go.

The era has come in which we have to settle down somewhere and represent our beliefs. I don't say fight for them, because fighting over ideas is one of the primary things we need to outgrow. But every time you leave a place to the other point of view, they proliferate there and eventually expand. Sooner or later you have to face them.

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