The big bag of gross that is HB1217 has been largely overshadowed by Hal Wick’s symbolic fail mandatory gun law, but lest we get too distracted by the hilarity and forget about all the nefarious stuff going down in Pierre, I wanted to revisit and dig a big deeper.

As you’ll remember from yesterday, this bill is really long and stuffed full of crazy. While Hal Wick is losing his mind over ‘death panels,’ we’ve got a piece of legislation here that would require a woman seeking an abortion to go in front of an Unruh panel before she could get her procedure. Luckily, this thing is so out of left field, so open to court challenges, that you have to wonder if the sponsors actually have any interest in it becoming law or if was just the result of some twisted anti-choice MADlib at their last misogynist sleepover.

While Planned Parenthood v. Casey did a lot of things I don’t really dig — like allow mandatory waiting periods — it did set some limits for the mutated version of informed consent that abortion patients are subjected to. It allowed the state to pass laws with the purpose to “dissuade” women from choosing abortion, as long as the information it required was “truthful and not misleading.” That’s why a good part of South Dakota’s current informed consent statute has been struck down (at great expense to the state, of course). Crisis pregnancy centers, the real ‘stars’ of 1217, are the very definition of misleading. Numerous investigations and reports have concluded as much.

Another important aspect of Casey to note is that it struck down a provision requiring women to notify their spouses of their abortions. Yet somehow the yahoos behind this bill think they can compel a woman to disclose her medical details to some washed up youth pastor turned ‘counselor’ at the Alpha Center? I guess that’s why Marty Jackley gets paid the big bucks.

Casey also created a test for abortion restrictions known as “undue burden.” The Court explained:

“A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus. A statute with this purpose is invalid because the means chosen by the State to further the interest in potential life must be calculated to inform the woman’s free choice, not hinder it. And a statute which, while furthering the interest in potential life or some other valid state interest, has the effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman’s choice cannot be considered a permissible means of serving its legitimate ends.”

HB1217 has Due Process Violation written all over it. There’s no other way to interpret its labyrinth-like mandates than as a blatant attempt to hinder a woman’s free choice and to place substantial obstacles in her path.

The bill is on its way to House Judiciary, where 8 out of 13 members are sponsors of this piece of crap, so I don’t expect it to die the swift death it deserves there. Let’s do our best to make sure it doesn’t get any farther than that for the sake of the women of our state and for our tax dollars that are so desperately needed elsewhere.