On November 4, voters in South Dakota must decide once again whether to ban virtually all abortions in their state. Two years ago, South Dakotans acted to protect private health care decisions when they voted against a sweeping abortion ban. Today, these same voters need your help to stop yet another intrusive attack on reproductive freedom: the 2008 abortion ban ballot initiative, Measure 11.
The outcome of South Dakota’s election could affect us all. As Louise Melling, Director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, warns, “The real purpose of Measure 11 is to overturn
Roe v. Wade.”
We may not all feel the same way about abortion, but we can agree that these are private decisions. Everyone’s life and circumstances are different; we must respect people’s personal choices even if we wouldn’t make the same decision. Measure 11 would take these profoundly personal decisions out of the hands of women and their families. We can’t let this happen.
Watch Louise Melling deliver this important “Freedom Alert.” Please forward it widely: Measure 11 reaches far beyond South Dakota and could take away everyone’s right to make private family decisions. And be sure to visit
www.sdhealthyfamilies.org for more information about what you can do to help defeat this dangerous measure.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:53 am
I fail to see how the right to terminate a pregnancy is a civil liberty that should be protected.
October 11th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I’m all for legal abortion, but Roe v. Wade is bad Constitutional law, and needs to be overturned. Legal abortion needs to come about through legal means.
October 12th, 2008 at 9:15 am
“but we can agree that these are private decisions.”
Um, no, we can’t.
Ryan, it’s really quite simple: The ACLU holds anything they approve of to be a civil liberty, even if it’s not mentioned in the Constitution, and nothing they disapprove of is ever a civil liberty, even if the Bill of Rights specifically guarantees it, and calls it a right.
October 12th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
It is a civil liberty that should be protected because 1) no woman should be forced to derail her academic, career, or other personal plans, 2) every child that is born deserves to be wanted and properly cared for and this isn’t always the case when women are forced to continue full-term, 3) it is a choice that immediately affects the woman who is pregnant, and her alone, 4) when abortion rights are infringed upon, it becomes increasingly difficult to break the cycle of teen pregnancy and teen mothers, and thus to create a better environment with more opportunities and greater care for every child.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Ryan, I fail to see how your opinion matters.
October 12th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Would not people taking responsibility for their actions before an innocent life is involved be a better answer than abortion?
October 12th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
it is not a person - it is a clump of cells.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
All four of Robin’s reasons are faulty to downright false. john’s (sic) claim that a clump of cells is the definition of what some say is not a person is not a medical/biological description or definition. It was fabricated as such. All four of the previous reasons were fabricated to justify abortions. Look it up. The documentation is not limited to an opinion but without simple objectivity all you will want is opinion.
October 14th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I say that she should have kept her legs closed. pretty simple dont want children dont have sex…..
October 14th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I am soOOOO glad you so called bunch of cells didnt get aborted….I rebuke you in Jesus Name……..
October 14th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Typical left wing thinking, murderers have more rights than babies. We should save a murder from the death penalty but kill innocent babies with abortion. Completely unimpressive logic people. Aren’t you all glad your parents loved you enough to value your life over their own selfish mistakes. This is not a civil liberty, this is a moral abomination.
October 14th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
If a “clump of cells” is not a person, than I guess that we’re not persons either because our skins and other organs are made up of cells. So we’re basically a clump of cells.
October 14th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Robin, you need to examine yourself because a person as self centered as you, who makes decisions according to what seems more convenient for you, will never be happy. If your mother would have been that self-centered, you wouldn’t be here today, contemplating all the reasons why letting your baby live would interfere with ‘your’ life. Thank your mom for loving you so much that she chose not to silence your voice before you would develope a mouth.
October 14th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I agree with Amos. Whatever happened to natural consequences and people being held accountable when they do wrong? We live in a disposable society. Don’t like your marriage, just get a divorce, don’t like your baby, kill it. I fear the current and future condition of a society that gives way to such debased thinking. I can see keeping abortion an option for women who have been raped (while I would still choose adoption), but just because a woman messes up and now her career or education are at stake…that’s ridiculous. We really need to go back to a time when consequences were a reality. Children can’t fail at school anymore, even when they have straight Fs, they don’t keep score in kid’s competetive sports, and we can just do what we want and evade consequences - we call this a civil liberty - this is a joke.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
You talk about choice. If someone chooses to rob a bank they can but they may be shot because they are stealing.Because innocent blood of the baby that cannot defend itself is shed.
We will have blood shed upon this nation because it is killing that baby. You had a choice when you decided to have sex. Use your brain.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
You talk about choice. If you choose to rob a bank you can, but you may be shot because they are stealing.
The BIBLE says if we shed innocent blood of the baby, God will require that blood at our hands. So war came to the land of Israel. It will also come to America most likely from Russia.
You had a choice when you had sex.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Only God has the right to give life and take it away! I am a registered nurse! Life starts at conception! Anyway who has sex should think about that fact you can get pregnant! It is not the babies fault! Take responsibility! Have sex in marriage! Have self discipline! Screw your schooling… start back up in 9 months! It will always be there! There are people like me that would love to adopt a baby!!! Animals are treated better! This is the holocaust! How can we say that Sharon Tate was murdered along with her unborn 8.5 month old baby still in the womb, or Lacy Peterson who was pregant! Double standard!!!
October 16th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Nonewithstanding that wack comment above:
Check out What White Women Want - Election 2008, a new investigation by Dolly Deadline at http://www.whatwhitewomenwant.com/
White women are expected to play a crucial and possibly determining role in the election. Dolly explores this new media phenomenon by interviewing an ‘assortment’ from this group and inviting them to blog about their concerns and hopes for our troubled country.
Michael Collins
October 17th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nation… Jeremiah 1:5 (KJV) If you don’t believe me, that’s ok, but it you don’t believe God’ word, you will have to give an account for your unbelief. Of course you don’t have an excuse for murdering babies in their mother’s womb. Repent! or die in your sins and go to a devils hell forever and ever.
October 20th, 2008 at 12:11 am
I am appalled we live in a society where people advocate the murder of children. There are couples who sit on waiting lists for years just to adopt a child they can’t give birth to themselves, and women are killing their babies at four, five, even SIX or SEVEN months?!? Regardless of being perfectly able to carry out a full term pregnancy and give the child for adoption?!? I’m disgusted. What ever happened to: “Gee, if I have sex, it is possible I WILL get pregnant, ergo have a child to raise.” It looks to me like teen and young mothers are using abortion as birth control. “I don’t want IT, so I’ll get rid of IT.” If the option of killing your baby wasn’t available in the first place, sooner or later people will think twice about being careless. Then guess what? Viola! Fewer unwanted pregnancies. (By the way Robin, I’d like to mention abortion doesn’t lessen pregnancies, it only means less teen mothers.)
October 20th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Think of your daughters in this situation…. If all abortions are made illegal, then if your only daughter is the victim of rape or forced intercourse & conceives a baby, that child would be a constant reminder of her hardships throughout her entire life. Think about a couple that’s expecting… What if the mother becomes ill and the choice is either to abort the pregnancy or give her own life so that the baby might live. Does she, or her husband, not have the right to choose her life over the unborn’s? The biggest point is that if you limit any abortions, eventually the right to choice in controversial situations like this will be eliminated as well. I do not think that one-night-stands that result in pregnancy should end up in abortions, but outlawing them would, in essence, take away my choice to not carry the seed of a rapist or my right to life- even with a severely pre-term fetus. Life does begin at conception, but it’s a woman’s choice throughout. She’ll be judged in the end. For now- let every woman have the right to that choice.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Are you blind, people? Are you that ignorant to allow one phrase, sentence, book, several books, several years of lies, or a whole nation to tell you and your conscience that MURDERING BABIES is EVIL?!?! Are you crazy? And then they call it “Freedom of reproductive, blah, blah, blah!” The time to stand is now. The time to tell the leftists that we will not stand for evil in our borders is now!
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:59 am
It’s pretty simple. Women should control their own bodies, not the government.
I heard recently that El Salvador has “vagina police” that examines women’s vaginas for evidence of an illegal abortion. Is that what we’ll have here in the US if abortion is outlawed in many states? And how long should a woman’s prison sentence be if she has an illegal abortion?
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
It’s not always simple. Let me say that again. It’s not always simple. In fact it almost never is. I feel like I’m hearing the same thing over and over: “murdering babies is wrong,” “abortion should be illegal.” These are opinions, and people are definitely entitled to them.
The sad thing is, though, that getting an abortion is not an easy choice for anyone. They don’t say to themselves “I’m going to murder my baby, doesn’t matter…” It’s a tough choice, and it can stay with people their whole lives.
I agree that abortion should in no way be a birth control, but the truth is that almost no one uses it that way. Victims of rape, forced-sex, whatever it may be. It’s not as simple as “don’t have sex, you idiot, and you won’t have kids.” That’s obvious, but it doesn’t always play out that way in the real world. There’s situations and times when we don’t always make the best decisions, or the situation presents itself. It’s a necessary freedom, even if we may not approve of it, the option should definitely be there for someone in need.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:02 am
I agree with Drew and Johanna.
I know someone who was raped when she was young and got pregnant because of it. She was harrassed and hounded, nearly stalked, by a “born again” couple who found out (very long story) and wanted to adopt her baby. They used the argument I’ve seen here about being selfish and how dare she when THEY wanted a baby. She told them, and rightfully so, that THEY were being selfish, not once thinking about her emotional turmoil (she was nearly suicidal) and how her physcial health wasn’t the greatest at the time either, and what she was going through. And after she told them off they actually were speechless and ashamed and left her alone after that! All of you self-righteous folks need to walk in the shoes of someone in that situation before you open your mouths to condemn them.
Furthermore, there will always be women who will decide they must have and abortion and if it is made illegal and these women die from complications of “back alley” abortions, would you so-called pro-lifers want that on your consciences?
Also, you folks are the ones who are against sex education and birth control. There are sadly still girls and women in this country who believe it if a guy tells them they won’t get pregnant if they “do it” a certain way because they aren’t taught any better. Sex ed. does not encourage more kids to have sex. In fact, it will deter some of them. The reality is that some kids are always going to, no matter what. Trying to force YOUR morality on them doesn’t help.
And please, stop with the over the top hysterical comments like “this is the Holocaust!” BTW, Michelle, abortion aside, no, for some people school would not “always be there.”
Bottom line, if you are against abortion, DON’T HAVE ONE and keep your nose out of other peoples’ private decisions.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:15 am
On the topic of sex ed. I meant to add, if there will always be teens who choose to have sex before marriage, isn’t it better that they have access to the facts and birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies than to have abortions or children who end up being abandoned or seriously abused? Wouldn’t that be a much lesser evil, according to what you believe?
Speaking of which, funny how all that talk about how bad it is to have unmarried sex dries up in some circles when a girl does get pregnant, isn’t it? Suddenly the act seems to no longer be a sin at all. Does pregnancy somehow wipe it out?
October 26th, 2008 at 11:18 am
According to the Bible, the unbord John the Baptist (in the womb of Elizabeth) “jumped for joy” at the presence of Jesus (in the womb of Mary) when Mary was only three days pregnant. Thus, unless you are an athiest or an agnostic and feel you you’ve made your own plans for the afterlife, we know from this that life begins at conception.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
We don’t all agree that it is a private discision. For those of us who view an unborn child as a human life, abortion is no more a private discision than abusing or murdering a 5 year old. That is the way most pro-life people view abortion. So dont speak for everyone.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
We cannot allow our rights to be vialated. I don’t agree with abortion either but I do agree that we all have the right to choose. If Amerca is so concerned with abortion why don’t we educate our children about sex, protection against unwanted pregnancies, atlternatives to abortion, and the stages of pregnancy and abortion procedures. This has to start at home with the PARENTS. This is not a government issue; it is a family issue. We cannot expect our children to make the right choices if we do not educate them. I vote, as a mother and an American, to protect my children’s and my right to privacy and our right to choose.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Another aspect regarding the legality of abortion, other than ones implicit right to privacy, lies in the courts ability to define a “person.” While the constitution itself does not define what it means to be a person, and therefore have the rights of every person, one of which is life, the fourteenth amendment does contain three references to “person,” as noted in the majority opinion of Roe v. Wade. The first and most important of these references is the one in which the definition of “citizens” is described as “persons born or naturalized in the United States.” The word “person” or “persons” is used several times in the Constitution as well as in the amendments to the Constitution and almost every time, according to the majority opinion, these references carry a postnatal connotation while none indicate any sort of prenatal application. Therefore, the word “persons” as interpreted by the Supreme Court through the references and context by which it is used in the constitution, does not include the unborn. Because the rights granted to “persons” do not include the unborn in the Constitution, that is to say that one is not recognized by to be a person by the federal government until they are physically born, it would be unconstitutional to pass along these rights to those who are not born. The court goes on to say in their majority opinion that
“There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth.”
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:22 am
YES KEEP ABORTION LEGAL.
EACH TIME YOU KILL AN INNOCENT AMERICAN
THERE WILL BE ONE LESS SOLIDER TO DEFEND YOU OR FOR YOU TO SEND ABROAD TO FIGHT US.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK ACLU
THE HAPPY JIHADIST
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Michael Vick kills a bunch of dogs, he goes to jail. 1.2 million women kill their unborn babies and there heralded as progressive.umm something’s not right here.
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
1.) Just as China forces abortion, Romania under Cesescu banned it. No government should do either.
2.) When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, NONE of the options available to her are good ones. All are emotionally traumatic to some degree.
3.) Regardless of which argument is brandished, the ultimate thesis statement of most antiabortion politicians is that women matter less than fetuses, even less than early-stage embryos. Abortion may be wrong, but for women to be enslaved to the fate of their reproductive systems is an even greater wrong.
4.) If your chromosomes are XY, pregnancy will NEVER affect your body, therefore you cannot even IMAGINE what it would be like not to have the OPTION of abortion. Across the span of human history, and regardless of religion, generation, or nationality, women want to control their own bodies.
5.) Abortion has always been a women’s issue, yet is equally an economic issue: the primary purpose of the political anti-abortion movement is to guarantee a permanent underclass and ensure a supply of cheap labor/cannon fodder: why else do so many anti-abortion politicians support capital punishment and wars of aggression, yet oppose legal abortion (and often birth control) and children’s benefit progrqams, such as increased funding for public education?
6.) Those who oppose legal abortion (and the key word is LEGAL) should know that some support abortion because parenthood is an immense emotional and financial responsibility, and should never be entered lightly (even by long-married couples) or accidentally.
7.) Please honor and respect the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: practice your religion as you want, but do not use it to legislate authoritarianism and oppression. Also, remember that RELIGION typically enters political discussion only when an argument’s LOGIC (such as the innate superiority of Caucasian males) does not hold.
8.) Finally, please thank the ACLU for providing this forum for your political beliefs, regardless of whether or not you agree with the ACLU!
November 4th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
“According to the Bible, the unbord John the Baptist (in the womb of Elizabeth) “jumped for joy” at the presence of Jesus (in the womb of Mary) when Mary was only three days pregnant. Thus, unless you are an athiest or an agnostic and feel you you’ve made your own plans for the afterlife, we know from this that life begins at conception.”
Yeah, well, in the Bible God also orders his people to kill innocent, live babies.
A fetus is not a PERSON, yet still a human, because it does not have conscious thought. It cannot make decisions. It cannot think or feel. This is the same thing with a person who is in a coma or whose body is alive, yet whose mind is dead - they are as good as dead, because they can’t feel or have any conscious thought.
Furthermore, most pro-life people fail to realize that pro-choicers want to keep abortion safe, legal, and rare. It’s not like we want people to keep using abortion facilities, but sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes it will happen anyway, and women will keep having abortions whether it is legal or not.