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South Dakota - Making it look like its legal to kill abortion providers!
Kistra
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The South Dakota house committee just altered a bill that started out proposing to allow pregnant women to use lethal force to protect themselves in a greater number of situations than non-pregnant people can and changed it into a bill that makes it legal to kill abortion providers. And then the committee passed the altered bill.
While the acknowledged intent of making it okay to kill abortion providers is horrific enough, it also seems like it can be used to excuse violence against pregnant women - which is the exact opposite intention of the original bill. The wording is just so vague it could be interpreted to mean anything from the actual doctors to nurses, pharmacists, friends providing rides, ect.
The SD House was supposed to vote on this bill yesterday but they deferred it to today.
Here is the full text of the bill as of 2/9/2011 and the underlined parts are the parts that this bill would add to the current definition of justifiable homicide:
While the acknowledged intent of making it okay to kill abortion providers is horrific enough, it also seems like it can be used to excuse violence against pregnant women - which is the exact opposite intention of the original bill. The wording is just so vague it could be interpreted to mean anything from the actual doctors to nurses, pharmacists, friends providing rides, ect.
The SD House was supposed to vote on this bill yesterday but they deferred it to today.
Here is the full text of the bill as of 2/9/2011 and the underlined parts are the parts that this bill would add to the current definition of justifiable homicide:
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That § 22-16-34 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-34. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is.
Section 2. That § 22-16-35 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-35. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being
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All these laws do is allow lethal force to be used to protect the life of an unborn child outside of the context of a legal abortion.
Rigorous Scholarship
If it was just a measure to protect against felony assaults, the mother is already legally protected by any reasonable interpretation of the law as it currently stands.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
IANAL but usually it seems like laws are pretty good about listing exceptions. South Dakota does define abortion as killing an unborn child so it isn't like the language is any different.
And your comment completely fails to address the possibility of this law being used to excuse violence against pregnant women.
Also, here is a link to all of SD abortion laws.
Anyway, if juries in SD want to let someone walk after they've killed an abortion provider, they don't need this law. They can just vote "not guilty" in the jury room and shake the guy's hand when he walks out of court a free man.
The first section clarifies that a pregnant woman can use deadly force to protect her unborn child. The second clarifies that unborn children can be protected by third parties (such as a father).
None of this gives you the right to kill a doctor who is legally providing an abortion to a willing patient.
I'm not sure where you get that from this statute.
Rigorous Scholarship
Including using violence to restrain the mother seeking the procedure.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I agree with MM with exception to this point regarding Section 2. The wording could certainly be cleaned up to provide clarification.
Also, "master, mistress, or servant"? If they are going to amend this, why not clean this up as well?
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Going to have to agree with MM here. The 'any person' only refers to the person with the unborn child.
A third party only has the authority to protect someone else's unborn child "if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury" and imminent danger of that design being carried out. So only in cases of felonies or imminent injury. An abortion procedure wouldn't count as that.
I think the potential violence to pregnant women nonsense would come up as a result of the "great personal injury" language, which is vague and duplicative of the 'felony' language. What great personal injury would their be that isn't a felony? That's just bad statute writing.
This is an attempt to establish a legal and moral precedent stating, "It is acceptable to kill an adult person to save a fetus." The long term goal of such a precedent should be eminently obvious. Some more extreme (less guarded, in my opinion) anti-abortionists already think it should not be permissible to get an abortion for health or even life-saving reasons.
See McCain's obvious contempt about "health of the mother," as one example of many.
So, no, this won't make killing abortion providers legal next month. But it absolutely is part of a concerted effort to remove the autonomy from women's bodies and to exalt the fetus beyond what is reasonably acceptable given its status. I think it's important to stand against piecemeal attacks against rights that are part of a greater whole (I've used the same argument for gun control legislation that is transparently an attempt to attack the easiest target's in order to gain a foothold).
No, you can't but that is pretty clearly what you are doing right now. You are thinking that the people creating this law and voting for it are some sort of emotionless robots who are trying to fix a perceived flaw on the legal framework, while actually they are conservative anti-abortionists. It's pretty obvious what the actual intent behind the law is. Not murdering abortion doctors, but it's clearly conservative weasel wording to try to cast another shadow on abortion.
@programjunkie- I don't really see an issue with allowing mothers or fathers to use deadly force to protect the lives of their unborn child. It's going to be a very rare situation where the mother's life also isn't in danger in such a situation, but this removes ambiguity.
I can't see any rational pro-choice person arguing that the right to have an abortion protects criminals targeting an unborn child.
Rigorous Scholarship
Jury nullification exists without this law. And any degree of force that really endangers a fetus is a serious danger to the mother as well. So I'm kind of at a loss as to why this would be a necessary amendment in any context other than an attempt to control the treatment of fetuses, a la abortion.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
of course, that's not much consolation to the hypothetical victim in that case. The real danger is not the law itself, but the rhetoric surrounding it... all these people saying "it's now legal to kill abortion providers in South Dakota!" Someone might take it seriously, unfortunately. And then find out that the legal distinctions weren't as clear cut as a 15 second sound bite made it seem.
I think that the law is fairly clear that a fetus is not a person. A fetus is a fetus. A person is a someone who's been born. The movement to provide additional rights and protections to fetuses isn't entirely irrational. But as I posted earlier, the real danger isn't the law, but people not understanding the law correctly, and then acting on that mistaken belief.
"Abortion," the use of any means to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with knowledge that the termination with those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the fetus;
"Fetus," the biological offspring, including the implanted embryo or unborn child, of human parents;
and finally
"Human being," an individual living member of the species of Homo sapiens, including the unborn human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages from fertilization to full gestation;
So from first fertilization ("Fertilization," that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum) it is illegal to deliberately harm the human being inside a woman
And now it is legal to kill anyone who would deliberately harm even a human zygote
So, to summarize
It is now legal to kill one of these
if they are trying to kill one of these
UNLESS it is a- "Medical emergency," any condition which, on the basis of the physician's good faith clinical judgment, so complicates the medical condition of a pregnant woman as to necessitate the immediate abortion of her pregnancy to avert her death or for which a delay will create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function
Tell me, how well are the orphanages in SD funded?
That's a big difference, and it's not just rhetorical.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Maybe the mother could pretend to want an abortion, then stab the doctor as he's trying to perform it, or something?
At worst, I think we'd have here a case of this law conflicting with the ones legalizing abortion, and the second someone tried to use it to defend murdering an abortion provider it would go to the courts, who would say, "What the fuck? No, you tard, murder is still murder, go directly to prison."
Oh! I see what you just did here!
You get to have a hypothetical where some evil criminal (perhaps similar to the guy in the denouement of Ender's Shadow) tries to kill some unborn child, while ignoring the fact that unless it is a medical emergency the "criminal targeting an unborn child"
Could very well be a physician, since performing non-medically required abortions is illegal, and anyone attempting to perform one is by definition at least an attempted criminal.
Honestly, though, we're entering thriller novel territory here.
Rigorous Scholarship
There's none, unless I'm terribly unimaginative. I don't have a problem with any person of any sex using lethal force to prevent them from being used as a punching bag to the extent it could cause internal damage, nor being force fed poison, which is pretty much how you can force someone to get an abortion.
What I have a problem with is the conflation of fetuses as equally valuable as adults, which is a trend that goes to all the wrong places.
Basically, the governor and cities/town/counties have almost all the power in the states. The state houses, while powerless, are also oddly large for their state sizes. So, you've got people in the state house elected by districts with less than 10K voters. Someone can get into the SD legislature with less real voters than the guy elected dog catcher in the state capitol. Add to this, there's a lot of mineral extraction industries in the state with large pockets and a vested interest in keeping the politics as conservative as possible.
So, the state pays for a bunch of loons to sit in the state house and dream up radical legislation that cannot get past even their state courts. In the last few years, it's become a clearinghouse for radical conservative spitballs, purposefully flawed legislation crafted to enter the federal court system and build precedents for moving the law slowly rightward.
I'm concerned that because it says 'commit a felony OR do great harm,' you could apply it to:
"Crazy can kill a doctor if the doctor is about to do 'great injury' to Crazy's wife's unborn child"
However, even in that scenario, he (Crazy) would have to burst into the clinic at the moment of the procedure. Hopefully he would have to show that he couldn't have convinced the doctor to stop the procedure without murder (Yes/No?). Which seems unlikely, as I'm willing to bet 100% of abortion doctors would stop if you pointed a gun at them.
Oh yeah, well what if a pregnant pro-life assassin goes in for an abortion, but right before the doctor starts she's all like "I CHANGE MY MIND", quickdraws the glock taped to her back and shoots the doctor square between the eyes, or if she snaps his neck between her thighs using Krav Maga training?
Bet you didnt think about that...
On one hand, we are the typical Conservative Midwest state in many regards. On the other hand, we almost got a medical marijuana bill passed, have an inordinate amount of RHINO's, and our major cities are starting to rapidly become cosmopolitan.
This bill (as I understand it) won't legalize murdering abortion doctors. The rhetoric behind it is much, much more dangerous. But thankfully, we don't really have that many loonies that are willing to go around blowing people away over something like this, and I have no doubt that our courts would find them guilty of murder in a heart beat.
This is really a bigger deal for the rest of the country then us. Both radical sides of the debate nationwide are seizing upon this bill and screaming like little children.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Those laws are already on the books since at least 2004 if not arguably earlier. I don't know what it is these laws are attempting to do, but it isn't make felony assault illegal. It's already illegal. That's why it's called felony assault.
No it would not.
Self defense, and defense of your immediate family does not constitute murdering someone for performing legal actions with consent on other persons.
Please do not be obsurd.
You can debate if the law allows the mother or father of the fetus to kill someone in 'self-defense' but the law in no way shape or form permits an unrelated 3rd party to do the same. But of course, we can't have facts get in the way of a good arguement can we?
This bill is a blatant attempt to pander to the incredibly large anti-abortion demographic. Abortion is one of those issues that every single candidate running for anything above janitor has to take a side on.
You also have to consider why this is being brought up now. Our new governor is going to get a 10% budget cut across the board pushed through the legislature. Most people in the state favor anything that doesn't raise their taxes. What they don't realize is the obvious amount of services and jobs that are going to be lost due to the cuts. The cuts are going to leave a large amount of people jobless and angry.
Co-incidentally, this is being brought up at the same time. It panders to a wide majority of voters who are going to be affected by the budget cuts. So, come re-election time, the Pubs who pushed the budget cuts through can point at the abortion bill as a gold star on their resume.
I think it's really weird that it only allows the mother or father. Are there any other laws like this? Am I only allowed to use force to protect an actual child from being attacked if it's my child?
Do you really see a need for this law? Have there been cases where parents have been convicted of homicide for protecting their unborn children?
So, I guess the short answer is that this isn't an unusual limitation.
It's probably mostly being passed to make a statement. But I don't see any real harm.
Rigorous Scholarship
Obviously lethal force towards the pregnant woman isn't a particularly useful choice, but this seems to be putting more weight on the rights of the unborn, which could prove problematic in other facets.
There probably hasn't. I dont see how this law will change anything. It is mostly political grandstanding to satisfy the pro-life crowd who elected the bunch that passed this.
The old, what can we do to make it seem like were doing something, when we really arn't doing anything political trick.
Rigorous Scholarship