by Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 1/13
SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota — To know what’s at stake in the Supreme
Court confirmation hearings, it’s best to travel 1,200 miles west from
the paneled Senate room to a small nondescript clinic in a Great Plains
state.
It’s best
to turn from the blue-and-white charts brandished by senators to the
parking lot filled with cars from places as far away as Rapid City or
even Wyoming. It’s best to turn from the buzz about precedents and
privacy to the quiet of a waiting room.
Here, late in the
afternoon, the clinic is still full. There’s a soldier who will make a
700-mile round trip from the western part of the state. There’s a
teenager slouching beside a tense mother. There’s a rancher, a mother
of two high-schoolers and pregnant after having an IUD removed.
This is the only
clinic in the state and this is the only day in the week when a woman
can get an abortion in South Dakota. Today, they’ll be treated by one
of four doctors flown in from Minneapolis because it’s impossible to
recruit locally. Today’s doctor is Miriam McCreary, a mother of four
and grandmother of nine, who graduated from medical school in 1958. At
70, she still knows ”how desperate women are to end their pregnancies.”
One clinic, one day, one
doctor. This is what it’s like in South Dakota right now under Roe v.
Wade. It’s also like this in North Dakota and Mississippi, and not very
different in Arkansas or a dozen other states.
Antiabortion
lobbyists here boast that South Dakota is the legislative laboratory
for testing and imposing state restrictions. Last year, five new
restrictions passed, including one, now being challenged, to force
doctors to recite a state-written speech saying that abortion ends the
life of ”a whole, separate, unique living human being.” This year, the
Legislature, which just opened its 35-day session, is being pressed by
a state task force to add more mis-informed consent, more delays, more expensive barriers.
It goes without
saying that South Dakota is one of seven states with a ”trigger law”
ready to ban abortion if Roe is overturned. But something else requires
saying: It’s possible to add so many burdens onto the back of Roe that
it collapses without ever being overturned.
Kate Looby, the
thoughtful and energetic state director for Planned Parenthood, puts it
simply: Even if Roe is saved, ”we’ll end up living in a country in
which women theoretically have legalized, safe abortion. But for the
women of South Dakota, that won’t mean anything.” She has had to
imagine moving this last clinic over to Minnesota.
Here then is the
lens through which to watch the Alito hearings. Back in D.C.,
supporters create charts that compare Samuel A. Alito Jr. to Sandra Day
O’Connor, ”Model Justice.” If O’Connor was a moderate, they protest
smugly, so is Alito.
Indeed,
O’Connor’s decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood ruled that states
can regulate abortion as long as they don’t impose an ”undue burden”
on the right. In South Dakota, says Looby ruefully, ”the Legislature
has never met a burden it didn’t like.” Has Alito?
Twenty years ago,
Alito believed that the Constitution doesn’t protect abortion rights.
He doesn’t disavow that. He laid out a strategy on how to eat away at
abortion without a frontal assault on Roe. It was a blueprint
pro-lifers have followed, one regulation at a time. Later, as a judge
he said the state could order a woman to notify her husband before she
could get an abortion. O’Connor strongly disagreed.
That moderate
”model justice” Alito would replace also wrote this: ”the ability of
women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the
nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their
reproductive lives.” Does Alito agree?
More than 30
million women in America have had abortions since Roe. Seventy percent
of Americans say Alito shouldn’t be confirmed if he would end Roe. In
the hearings, even prolife senators insist, ironically and
disingenuously, that Alito has an ”open mind.”
But the question
is not just whether he’ll overturn Roe. It’s whether he’d let it be
crushed. In 10 years, more than 400 state regulations have been added
and more are coming. When do burdens that force women to state-shop for
their rights become ”undue”?
Today, at the
only clinic in South Dakota, the rancher doesn’t know much about Alito
but believes abortion ”shouldn’t be up to anyone but the woman.”
Tomorrow, Dr. McCreary will fly back to Minneapolis. Kate Looby will
drive up to Pierre to fight the next set of regulations.
Meanwhile, back
in Washington, Samuel Alito Jr. sits before a committee, and stolidly,
doggedly, rejects one vastly overdue burden: telling us what he
believes.
Ellen Goodman’s e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.