Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, state constitutions have become the new battleground for abortion advocates. In South Dakota, the Life Defense Fund's Caroline Woods says the industry has successfully manipulated citizens to put the controversial Amendment G on their state's November ballot.
If the measure passes, the state that currently bans most abortions would have little ability to regulate it. There would be no first-trimester restrictions on abortion, and in the second trimester, the state could impose restrictions only "in ways that are reasonably related to the health of the women."
In the third trimester, the state could regulate the practice when it "is necessary, in the judgment of the woman's physician, to preserve the life and health of the woman."
Woods told Washington Watch Wednesday that Amendment G, which also eliminates conscientious protections for pro-life physicians and parents' right to know if their daughter has been coerced into an abortion, is "radical."
And how it came to appear on the ballot is just as appalling. She said a group called Dakotans for Health ignored state laws to secure the necessary petition signatures.
"They lied and said it was a grocery tax or a pro-life measure, and people signed it," Woods told Jody Hice. "They said, 'Oh, this is going to restore Roe v. Wade back to the 22 weeks we had beforehand.' It does not do that. It does much more."
Dakotans for Health used paid out-of-state "circulators" to help reach the required number of signatures, and Woods has spoken to numerous people, including a pastor, who regret having signed the petition.
"South Dakotans think this is too radical and too far and that they’ve been lied to and deceived," she relayed.
Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, affirmed that misinformation is a key strategy for the abortion camp.
"There are no states in the entire country that forbid life-saving treatment for the mom," the veteran OBGYN told Hice. "This is all blinding snow because the abortion industry is afraid of the actual definition of abortion, which is to make sure a perfectly healthy baby comes out dead."
She said the laws "need to be black and white," as too many Americans fail to understand that protections for the life of the mother are already in place, even in states with abortion restrictions.
"Every single law that has any kind of limitation on elective abortion says exquisitely clearly, 'This does not apply to ectopic pregnancies. This does not apply to when the baby has already died. This does not apply to when the mother's life is threatened,'" Dr. Harrison noted.
"People aren't reading their laws, and the abortion industry is trying everything to make sure people don't read the law," she added.
The South Dakota Legislature has passed a bill that allows people to remove their names from a petition if they believe they were deceived into signing it, but even so, ballots will soon be printed. And constitutional amendments leave little room for tweaking once put in place.
"We can't add protections for women and children or conscientious objections for doctors," Woods explained. "We'd have to go back through this entire process to get this thing annulled altogether."
