Would A South Dakota Bill Legalize The Murder Of Abortion Clinic Workers?

In South Dakota some lawmakers want to expand existing self defense laws defining justifiable homicide to include the defense of unborn children. Originally the legislation was intended only to justify a mother killing to protect her unborn child, but it has been amended to grant legal protection to relatives of the unborn child as well.

Now some are claiming that the bill would make legal the murder of abortion clinic workers.

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — Efforts to expand South Dakota’s definition of justifiable homicide to include killings that protect unborn children ran into opposition Tuesday, when one critic argued that recently added language could provide a “license to kill” abortion doctors.

The bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Phil Jensen, said the measure merely seeks to make self-defense laws consistent with other South Dakota laws that allow murder or manslaughter charges for the death of an unborn child.

“This has nothing to do with abortion. This is a self-defense bill,” Jensen, R-Rapid City, told The Associated Press.

The bill originally sought to allow a pregnant woman to use force to protect her unborn child without being prosecuted for homicide or assault. But in a committee hearing last week, lawmakers broadened the bill to also allow a woman’s relatives to claim justifiable homicide if they killed someone to protect an unborn child.

Rep. Peggy Gibson said that could allow someone to claim self-defense for killing abortion providers, including doctors, nurses and other staff at abortion clinics.

“If this bill passes, in theory it would allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman with an abortion. It’s a license to kill abortion providers,” Gibson, D-Huron, said Tuesday.

I don’t think the originators of this law intend to legalize the murder of abortion clinic workers, but the unintended consequences of their legislation illustrate the absurd legal state of abortion laws in this country.

In many states in this country, if you attack a pregnant woman and kill her unborn child you can be charged with murder. But because the Supreme Court has defined abortion as a right, a woman choosing to kill her own unborn child is perfectly within the bounds of the law.

In Virginia in 2006 a pregnant woman shot herself in the stomach just days before her due date in order to kill the child she didn’t want. A court ruled that she had simply performed an ill-advised, late-term abortion. But if she had shot her child just days later, after giving birth, she’d have been a murderer.

The legal status quo surrounding abortion is illogical and monstrous. By no rational basis, legal or scientific, can we draw a line – be it during the child’s time in the womb or some time after birth – and say that before it there is no life but after it there is.

From a scientific standpoint, life begins at conception and is a continuum of growth and development that does not stop until death be it of natural causes or under the scalpel of an abortionist.

I, for one, do not want to see abortion clinic doctors and nurses menaced or murdered. But neither do I want to see them murdering the unborn.