Appeals Court Overturns Injunction Holding Up Enforcement of South Dakota Abortion Law

When it operates the way it ought to, stories written by the Associated Press very helpfully cut to the chase. The lead paragraph from a recent story is a good example: “A federal appeals court ruled that South Dakota can begin enforcing a law requiring doctors to tell women seeking abortions that the procedure ends a human life.”
While there is a lot more to the case, this tells the reader that even as further legal maneuvers take place, the 7-4 decision by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means South Dakota can enforce House Bill 1166, passed in 2005.
The law was to take effect July 1, 2005, but Planned Parenthood raced to court and won a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier of Rapid City, South Dakota. Her initial decision was later affirmed by a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit, a decision which the full Court overturned June 27.
Mary Spaulding Balch, NRL State Legislative Director, said she was delighted by the decision. “What’s at issue is what you can tell a pregnant woman contemplating an abortion to ensure that her decision is an informed decision,” she said. “The lopsided vote in our favor strongly affirms what common sense declares and abortionists try to obscure: that (as the statute says) ‘abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.’”
Balch explained that the full federal appeals court rejected the linchpin of Planned Parenthood’s argument, one that is so old it’s practically covered with dust: “To state the simple biological truth about the unborn is by definition an ‘ideological’ statement on the part of the state that ‘dictates’ what the doctor (the abortionist) must say.”
The majority refused to accept this canard. Reading between the lines it’s clear that the majority was not impressed by the caliber of the witnesses Planned Parenthood brought to the legal table or the depth of their argument.
To buttress its claims that physician’s free speech rights were violated “by compelling them to deliver the State’s ideological message, rather than truthful and non-misleading information relevant to informed consent to abortion,” PPFA offered affidavits from only two witnesses.
One simply stated that the disclosure “are statements of ideology and opinion, not medicine or fact,” the majority wrote. The other expert contended there is no medical consensus that the unborn is a separate, unique, living human being.
By contrast the state of South Dakota provided a plethora of testimony from women who “felt their decisions would have been better informed if they had received from their abortion provides the information required by” the law and portions of HR 1166’s legislative history.
In addition a number of experts offered scientific evidence to support the conclusion that undergirds the disclosure--that the “human embryo is a distinct individual human being, a complete separate member of the species Homo sapiens, and is recognizable as such.”
After a careful perusal of its own prior rulings and the testimony, the court majority concluded that Planned Parenthood had not demonstrated that the disclosure was “untruthful or misleading” or that there was an “ideological message from which physicians need to disassociate themselves.”
South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long, who is defending the law, told the Associated Press, put if this way: "The bottom line is if the state Legislature orders a professional to tell the truth, that's not a violation of the First Amendment.”
Having vacated the preliminary injunction, the court remanded the case to Judge Schreier.
 

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com