South Dakota Searchlight notes that South Dakota’s new 2026 House Bill 1257, signed into law by Governor Larry Rhoden on March 20, is the first post-Dobbs state law to clarify a state’s abortion ban to purportedly protect health care professionals from prosecution for providing standard medical care that results in the death of a fetus.
But Sioux Falls OB-GYN Dr. Amy Kelley agrees with me that HB 1257 offers caregivers and pregnant women little real protection from the anti-abortion fanatics:
Dr. Amy Kelley, an OB-GYN in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who was the chair of the South Dakota chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists from 2023 to 2025, said lawmakers ignored her and other doctors’ concerns that the amended abortion ban is still too vague.
“The whole point of medicine is to prevent people from becoming on the brink of death, right? So are they expecting us to wait until that?” Kelley said. “It’s still not very clear, and the definition for miscarriage and ectopic is also not the one we wanted. It’s just not helpful.”
Kelley said that since her state enacted an abortion ban, she often waits longer to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons, and will sometimes send patients out of state for care. She noted that the new law doesn’t explain what level of risk to the pregnant woman justifies terminating a pregnancy.
“They want to say elective abortions are not allowed. But what do they consider elective?” she said. “Let’s say they have a heart condition and their risk of dying in pregnancy is 40%. Is that an elective abortion because their risk is not 100%?” [Sofia Resnick, “Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Seek to Redefine ‘Abortion’ to Exclude Medical Treatment,” Stateline, 2026.04.13]
When Leslee Unruh and Dale Bartscher are standing right at the Governor’s shoulders when he signs a bill, you know the bill is not making it easier for any women in any condition to abort her pregnancy.
If Republicans really want to end women’s health care choices state governments should outlaw obesity and encourage businesses like airlines and taxi services to charge more for obese people. Food stores would have scales at tills that add surcharges according to body mass index, businesses with buffets would have scales, too and anyone with a BMI over 23 will pay an additional $1.00 for every whole number above that. Gas stations would have scales that determine price per gallon according to BMI unless you have documentation in your debit/credit card updated by your physician that you’re on a weight reduction regimen and Mr. Trump’s health guru, Mr. Kennedy, apparently concurs.
Maybe the AI Jesus of America could do something to clarify what this law actually says. Oh he disappeared already. Well maybe next time. He hasn’t been very elective this year anyway.
larry, I don’t follow your logic. What does ending women’s health care have to do with obesity? Are you implying that obesity is a woman’s problem or am I misunderstanding what you wrote?
I pretty much think women were doing okay until Trump had Roe vs Wade overturned. It sent us back to the 1950’s and beyond for not just health care but a way of life.
Feminism is equality for all like the Declaration of Independence states. Our bodies, our choice. This mantra allowed us a life, a choice that men don’t have to think about. It gave us the ability to choose when to have children or not. How many of you men thought of that growing up?
I know more men who are pro-choice and like me don’t consider it to be just about abortion. These same men believe their medical life and private life should be discussed with doctors, not politicians. Women deserve the same privacy.
One state is considering a law to follow the progress after a woman is determined to be pregnant. Can anyone help me with where it i? I heard it on NPR while in the car.
My argument is that if pregnancy can be regulated, obesity can be, too.
The problem with the “my body my choice” argument is that
there is more that one body involved. And the one body has no choice.
1. Abortion is health care and a pregnant woman is the patient.
2. Ectopic pregnancies kill women.
3. Rich women have full reproductive rights while women at the lower income margins suffer chilling effects on those rights. Women in Texas, Wyoming and South Dakota who can afford it simply jump on a plane and fly to Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Denver or elsewhere for their procedures. Imagine a woman on the Standing Rock or Pine Ridge doing that.
4. In South Dakota local control is Republican control and the demented legislature’s repeated attempts to restrict access to medical care are not only mean-spirited, they’re discriminatory anti-choice extremism.
5. “Pro-life” is simply code for white people breeding. Republicans drive the abolition of women’s rights because they’re wedded to the Great Replacement Hypothesis. But, African-Americans terminate pregnancies at about the same per capita rate as white people do but don’t take their jobs. Latinas, however, have fewer abortions per capita so the extreme white wing laments it’s hemorrhaging jobs to Latinos.
6. No foetus in the United States has any civil rights. Republicans preach civil rights for human blastocysts but deny the protections of the First, Fourth and Ninth Amendments to people who enjoy cannabis.
7. Republican politicians drive their anti-woman crusade to raise campaign dollars so ending reproductive rights in red states is Balkanizing women’s health care.
8. A blastocyst is no more an unborn child than it is an unborn grandparent. Foetal development is undefined in US Constitutional law so if someone calls it a baby that’s an opinion and not a legal definition.
9. There is no foetal heartbeat until at least ten weeks into a pregnancy. What an ultrasound “hears” at six weeks are cells beginning to build a cardiac system entirely dependent on amniotic fluid produced by a person with actual civil rights!
10. States that ban or punish women from tapping or going out of state for their medications or procedures is government overreach and are violating the Commerce Clause enumerated in the United States Constitution.
11. One fifth of all pregnancies end in miscarriage or as some would call God working in mysterious ways but when a person with a free will chooses to terminate a pregnancy the creator doesn’t condone that decision? How does that work?
12. Only 1% of abortions occur in the third trimester and are performed for medical reasons such as foetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment.
13. If Republicans really want to end women’s health care decisions state governments should outlaw obesity and encourage businesses like airlines and taxi services to charge more for obese people. Food stores would have scales at tills that add surcharges according to body mass index, businesses with buffets would have scales, too and anyone with a BMI over 23 will pay an additional $1.00 for every whole number above that. Gas stations would have scales that determine price per gallon according to BMI unless you have documentation in your debit/credit card updated by your physician that you’re on a weight reduction regimen and Mr. Trump’s health guru, Mr. Kennedy, apparently concurs.
14. It’s all related: a medical industry oligopoly, gender dysphoria, polluted waterways, subsidized agriculture, absence of medical insurance, cancer and an Earth hating legislature on the dole. But, applaud the nutball Republican efforts diverting attention from the party’s culture of corruption where murders and their covers up are commonplace by clogging the legislative session with christianic religionist argle-bargle.
larry, you said it all. Thanks
Well, women in Canada and Mexico have freedom. The US of A will take longer.
The Republican party is totally misogynist. It could take awhile. I don’t think a vote will happen anytime soon. Too bad. So women how are you going to vote?
We need to vote for those who won’t take our vote away. Those rascally Republicans are already chipping away at it. And, they don’t want smart women getting elected, just air heads. So smart women out there, run for office. Those of you men who appreciate people for who they are and their talents, run for office.
Mark, you are a talented artist. I also congratulate you on being a retired teacher. It is underappreciated in S.D.
Edwin, right, the fetus’s body has no choice because it is entirely subordinate to the woman carrying it until delivery. Choices relating to her health and anything inside her belong rightly and entirely to her. You and I don’t get to pretend that we are speaking for some entity within her and override her choice.
Cory, I respectfully disagree. It is also worth saying that the
future of the human race depends upon women having babies.
Also, according to google research, only 4 to 5 percent of
abortions are medically necessary.
Medical necessity and reproductive freedoms are inalienable rights regardless of the religiosity of the few.
@VM – The state that drew national attention for proposing pregnancy‑monitoring legislation was Tennessee. News outlets, including NPR, reported that Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would have required:
Reporting every known pregnancy to the state
Reporting the eventual outcome (birth, miscarriage, stillbirth)
Creating a system that could identify pregnancies with no reported outcome, which critics argued could be used to investigate abortions
It didn’t pass, but it was the clearest example of a state explicitly considering a pregnancy‑tracking framework.
AI gen
Thanks Porter, I knew I didn’t hear wrong. Scary that this was even introduced.
Thank you, Larry! Well said!
BTW, Mr. Arndt, if the mother dies, so will the fetus. And sometimes the fetus will kill the mother (or “host body” as so many conservatives like to call her). Ectopic pregnancies cannot be transplanted into the womb. Nor into a test tube. It will die, whether it is removed from the woman or kills her, too.
It is estimated that 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, with some studies suggesting the rate is closer to 25% or higher when including very early losses. Most miscarriages—roughly 80%—occur in the first trimester before the 12th week of pregnancy. Often before the woman knows she’s pregnant. I had a miscarriage over 50 years ago, before I knew I was pregnant, and the hemorrhage nearly killed me. I required 9 units of blood. Ask a nurse. That’s a lot.
Some states are requiring “investigations” of miscarriage.
Mifepristone, the “abortion” pill, is also used for the medical treatment of high blood sugar caused by high cortisol levels in the blood (hypercortisolism) in adults with endogenous Cushing’s syndrome. It’s also used for uterine fibroids and endometriosis. And when there’s a miscarriage and things are turning septic, it’s used to clean out the womb.
I strongly suggest that you read this article on the complications of pregnancy. There are a lot of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complications_of_pregnancy
Pregnancy and childbirth are “natural”, yes, but there is still today, with all of our medical and health care, a horrible maternal mortality rate:
“The U.S. maternal mortality rate of 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022 was more than 55% higher than the rate in Chile, the nation with the second-highest mark among those included in the analysis. While the year from which data was drawn varied among countries, Norway had the lowest maternal death rate with no deaths per 100,000 live births, followed by Switzerland at 1.2 per 100,000…” The lack of universal health care is a large factor.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2024-06-04/how-the-u-s-compares-to-other-rich-countries-in-maternal-mortality
Well said Eve!