North Star Writers Group

South Dakota voters decided on Tuesday to overturn their state’s near total abortion ban. That’s a small victory on an issue that, regardless, won’t go away.

The tragedy of abortion is magnified and repeated by turning a private emergency into a very public, political football. Make no mistake. An unwanted pregnancy is a disaster - a crisis of spiritual and emotional dimensions as well as physical proportions.

Until we have walked in the unhappy shoes of a woman who faces an unwanted pregnancy, none of us has any right or prerogative to make snap judgments about her and what she should or shouldn't do about it. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Few women set out to become pregnant when they don’t want to be. And we compound their sorrow and suffering when we seek to limit women’s options in such situations.

We also violate the U.S. Constitution and a woman’s free will when we outlaw her right to choose and thus compel her to bear a child when she does not want to do so.

Abortion opponents have ridiculed the basis of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision as founded on a right to privacy that is not spelled in so many words in the Constitution.

But the Constitution can’t get much more explicit than the 13^th Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. Since when is it a crime to be pregnant and not want to be?

Coercing women into continuing an unwanted pregnancy and giving birth is nothing less than involuntary servitude to someone else’s religious or social beliefs. We have a name for coerced sex. We call it rape and make it a crime. Why then do we not also take a dim view of coerced pregnancy and childbirth? Why are women’s needs and rights virtually invisible in all the hot air about abortion?

The freedom to choose doesn't inevitably mean a woman will opt for an abortion. Many years ago, I participated in a healing circle. This gentle, loving process enabled a woman whose marriage was beyond repair and who already had one child to summon the faith to continue a pregnancy that she seriously had considered aborting. She divorced not long after, and her son will be 17 on his next birthday.

Had South Dakota chosen to deny access to legal and safe abortions, the women in that state would have paid a high price. Pregnancy and childbirth involve more risk than most of us realize.

A study published by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the actual incidence of deaths and injuries to women in this country as a result of pregnancy and childbirth might be twice as high as the officially reported rate.

Carrying a pregnancy to term and then delivering is 11 times more risky than a legal abortion, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

In a nation that claims self-determination as one of its founding precepts, each woman has the constitutional right to assume or reject those risks. If she chooses to continue her pregnancy, I applaud her courage and hope to celebrate with her the birth of a healthy, wanted child and her own recovery.

But if she doesn't want to face those risks or has any other reason for not wanting to continue her pregnancy, no one has either the constitutional or the spiritual right to violate that woman’s free will by compelling her to remain pregnant and give birth because the safe alternative has been outlawed. No one.

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