Board Member Hilde Lindemann On the South Dakota Ban

As we posted before, South Dakota's extremely restrictive ban on abortion has now been signed by the Governor Rounds. One of our newest board members, Hilde Lindemann, has posted a personally inspired and awesome commentary on the South Dakota ban on the new Hastings Center Bioethics Forum. Here is an excerpt that I found particularly powerful:

Significantly, what antiabortion legislation requires of women is quite different from what child-support legislation requires of delinquent fathers. To be sure, such fathers must pay child support, but they are never forced to what lawyers call “specific performance.” They aren’t required by law to change diapers, give baths, prepare and serve meals, help with homework, or take their children to soccer practice. All unwilling fathers have to do is pay up every month. Specific performance, in fact, is seen as a form of servitude that may lawfully be required only of conscripts when there is a clear and present danger to the state. It may not be imposed even on convicted felons. If a drunk driver smashes into your house, he might have to go to prison or (under certain victim compensation laws) pay for damages, but he doesn’t have to repair your brickwork or replace your broken door with his own hands. If your architect breaks her contract with you by failing to produce the agreed-upon blueprints, the court can impose a fine, but it can’t make her sit down at her drafting table and do the promised work.

And that, when all is said and done, is the difference the South Dakota legislators want to draw between actual fathers and expectant mothers. They want to hold pregnant women – who are innocent of any wrongdoing – to a punitive standard of specific performance, sentencing them against their will to the many kinds of hard work, physical discomfort, and outright danger that my daughter has undertaken to bring her wanted child into the world. No other class of people is held to this standard in peacetime. No woman should be held to it either.

Way to go, Hilde!