Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

Here's a story from Mississippi concerning reproductive rights from the BBC.

Abortion battle lines drawn in Mississippi

The Jackson Women's Health Organization is an anonymous enough building in the heart of strip mall America. Anonymous save for the permanent protest outside.

Arriving here is an intimidating, even shocking, experience. Anti-abortion campaigners hold up enormous and gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses. They stop every car going into the car park and try to persuade those inside to wind down their windows and take their literature.

The women going into this clinic for an abortion are screamed at. One protester, a man, yells "Don't go to those demons, don't let them take your money, don't let them kill your baby". When I ask him why he is being so aggressive, he tells me it's because America needs to know the truth: "Abortion is murder," he says.

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Betty Thompson, the clinic's former director, has become its chief campaigner, fighting to keep it open. "This is a vital facility - to close it would remove an important part of women's healthcare - the women of this state need it," she says.

Pro-choice and anti-abortion campaigners at a demonstration in South Dakota where most abortions have been banned
Alongside her sits Dr Joseph Booker, who performs many of the abortions here. He explains that he now takes extra measures to protect his own security. But he won't tell me what measures. "I am concerned about my own safety but I won't let it cripple my life. To close this clinic and ban abortion would in my view violate all women's constitutional rights."

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Lawmakers have already drafted a bill to ban abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the mother's life.

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Here's an Op-Ed from the Los Angeles times by a University of Texas Law professor on an inconsistency in the South Dakota abortion ban.

Abortion law's criminal loophole
Who would go to jail in South Dakota? Not women, and it's all because of politics.

WHAT IF THE Supreme Court overrules Roe vs. Wade by allowing South Dakota's new abortion statute to pass constitutional review? Abortion, which has been governed in our time by constitutional law, again would be a matter of criminal law. The chief question would be: Who goes to prison?

South Dakota's legislators included this language in their new law: "Nothing in this act may be construed to subject the pregnant mother upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any criminal conviction and penalty." If abortion is a crime, why excuse the woman from punishment?

In the century or so before Roe vs. Wade, when criminal abortion laws were abundant in the United States, legislatures often explicitly exempted the woman's behavior from abortion statutes. When they did not, prosecutors and courts found ways to avoid punishing the woman.

In those days, such moves were justified by rationales such as this, from the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1904: "The public policy that underlies this legislation is based largely on protection due to the woman, protection against her own weakness as well as the criminal lust and greed of others. The criminal intent and moral turpitude involved in the violation, by a woman, of the restraint put upon her control over her own person is widely different than that which attends the man who, in clear violation of the law, and for pay and gain of any kind, inflicts an injury upon the body of a woman endangering health and perhaps life."

Surely the South Dakotans won't offer such a justification now...

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Debate about the constitutional right to privacy and the future of Roe vs. Wade should not obscure the serious flaw at the heart of criminal abortion laws. With a legal exemption for the woman, such laws are either intentionally discriminatory or devoid of rational justification. Without such an exemption, they are politically doomed.

Lets suppose for the sake of argument that abortion is murder. This is often the cry of the anti-choice crowd. It would logically follow that the mother, by choosing to abort her pregnancy, is therefore murderer. In fact, it would be pre-meditated in almost every case. So I see the point the author is trying to make. The South Dakota law exempts the woman who aborts from murder charges but it does so for reasons of political expediency, to maintain political support for the law. Only the practitioners of abortion are criminalized. I suppose though, that many within the anti-choice movement will continue to push for full criminalization. They do like to work incrementally, always chipping away at women's rights.

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Here's a link to a guest editorial from The Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon on the South Dakota abortion ban.

Abortion ban brings bad memories

South Dakota's new law, which bans abortions except for pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother, calls to mind the days before the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, when women were denied the right to control their bodies.

Such memories are easy for me. As a clergyman and counselor in a major American city, I was aware that 4,000 women a year entered our large public hospital after illegal, bungled abortions. Unable to find physicians to perform the procedure, women turned to incompetents who left them infected, mutilated and hemorrhaging.

Some were near death when they were admitted. Some had to have their reproductive organs removed. Others suffered infections that left them sterile. And some died as the result of botched or self-administered abortions.

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Abortion is a serious moral concern, not to be regarded as a form of birth control. Women don't choose abortion lightly. But their concern for the lifelong welfare and nurture of children leads them to abort. They have such a strong sense of love and responsibility for their potential baby that they want it to be raised with loving concern and promising opportunities for a good life.

They seek an abortion if they feel too young, too sick or too poor; if they are single or unable to be an adequate parent; or if they have too many children already or are in an unstable or unloving relationship; or if medical tests reveal the fetus to be abnormal.

Reverend Edgar Peara seems to understand trust

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And in the news from South Dakota this week we have another report about the private funding of the anticipated court challenge to the state's recently passed law.

Questions arise over transparency of new fund

PIERRE, S.D. - At least one state lawmaker worries that a special fund created to hold donations to pay for a possible legal fight over South Dakota's abortion ban might become a kind of secret account.

"I see this fund as another way to keep information from the public," Rep. Elaine Roberts, D-Sioux Falls, said. "I believe there should be a complete and public record of donors and the amount given."

But officials say they can't answer many questions about the fund, which has become law.

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Sara Rabern, spokeswoman for Attorney General Larry Long, said she could not give a definitive answer about whether the donation records would be public.

The new "life protection subfund" statute says the fund must go through the informational budget process. Under that process, a report to the Legislature details the condition of every fund under the control of the entity, the nature and extent of any investments and all receipts and expenditures for each of the past two fiscal years and for the next preceding fiscal year.

Those reports would be available for legislative and public inspection, said Reed Holwegner of the Legislative Research Council.

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"Any of the funds going into this particular fund, I would assume, I do not know positively whether they would be open and public records," Hunt said at the time. (Rep. Roger Hunt, who came up with the subfund plan.) He said he could not point "to a particular statute that would say they would be open."

No one has yet made public the identity of an anonymous donor who reportedly is willing to give the state $1 million to defend the ban.

"The governor has seen a letter from a private individual who has promised the state $1 million in the event this is litigated," Hunt said.

So there are all kinds of questions about this matter. There are questions about reporting requirements. There are questions about whether or not the records will be public. There are even questions about taxes. But very few answers are available as lawmakers and state officials seem unable to answer many questions about the fund. And don't forget the fund is already law. Who's going to answer these questions? The state Attorney General doesn't know. Questions about tax deductibility? Direct those to the IRS. The only thing the public seems to know for sure right now is that life protection subfunds smell very fishy."

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Here's Emergency Contraception news from Connecticut.

Victim Advocate Urged To Quit

Lt. Gov. Kevin B. Sullivan called on the state victim advocate to resign Tuesday, saying James Papillo's opposition to a bill that would require hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims violates his oath of office.

"Imagine the state victim advocate testifying against victim's rights," Sullivan said at a press conference in his Capitol office.

On Monday, Papillo, also an ordained deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, appeared at a legislative public hearing and opposed the proposed law that would require the state's four Catholic hospitals to offer the so-called Plan B emergency pill to all rape victims.

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In his testimony, Papillo said his opposition to the Plan B requirement had nothing to do with religion. Instead, he said the Plan B issue simply obscured the real needs of victims, including the need for more money for counseling and more court-appointed victim advocates.

But in an interview Tuesday he said the state must balance the religious rights of the hospitals against the needs of rape victims.

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Gov. M. Jodi Rell said Tuesday that she directed her legal counsel to express her displeasure to Papillo "over the inappropriate nature of his remarks."

"I believe he now understands that he went far beyond the bounds of victim advocacy," Rell said. "Mr. Papillo knows he must not cross the line again between his personal beliefs and the interests of those for whom he advocates."

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In International news we have a story from Mexico. Mexico has some very restrictive abortion laws. Mexico does permit a woman to abort a pregnancy that occurred due to rape but this law has been abused by the authorities. This week though the Mexican government has settled a claim that was filed against it before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights.

Mexico to compensate woman denied an abortion after rape

MEXICO CITY - The Mexican government is expected to offer a financial settlement today to a woman who was raped at 13 and then denied an abortion in violation of Mexican law.

"This is the most important legal victory for women in Mexico in a decade," said Luisa Cabal of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based rights group. "It is the first time a Latin American government has acknowledged that access to legal abortion is a human right."

The center and its partners in Mexico brought the case before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights on behalf of "Paulina," whose case gained international attention after officials, doctors and anti-abortion activists in her hometown of Mexicali on Mexico's Pacific coast pressured her not to obtain an abortion.

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Despite such progress, legal abortions can be difficult to obtain in Mexico, rights activists say, because health officials and others routinely deny pregnant rape victims their rights.

"For many rape survivors ... actual access to safe abortion procedures is made virtually impossible by a maze of administrative hurdles as well as '