Category: South Dakota

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Featured South Dakota

It’s Now Law – South Dakota Signs Bill Arming Teachers

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed a bill Friday allowing the state’s school districts to arm teachers and other personnel with guns.

Supporters say the so-called sentinels could help prevent tragedies such as the Connecticut school shooting in December. The law will go into effect July 1.

Several representatives of school boards, school administrators and teachers opposed the bill during committee testimony last month. They said the measure could make schools more dangerous, lead to accidental shootings and put guns in the hands of people who are not adequately trained to shoot in emergency situations.

But main bill sponsor Rep. Scott Craig, R-Rapid City, said earlier this week that he has received messages from a growing number of school board members and administrators who back it.

Craig said rural districts do not have the money to hire full-time law officers, so they are interested in arming teachers or volunteers.

The measure does not force a district to arm its teachers and would not force teachers to carry a gun.

On Monday, the South Dakota House voted 40-19 to accept the Senate version of the bill, which added a requirement that a school district must decide in a public meeting whether to arm teachers and others. Another Senate amendment allowed school district residents to push a school board’s decision to a public vote.

r/t AP

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Abortion Domestic Policies South Dakota women's

In Four Months, Republicans Introduced 916 Bills Against Women’s Right To Choose

It’s almost an unbelievable figure – 916. That’s the amount of legislation that Republicans introduced from January to April, trying to regulate a woman’s reproductive system. It’s absolutely stunning!

This information comes from a report by The Guttmacher Institute, and it finds that 49 states have contributed to this number with various bills geared towards regulating abortions and a woman’s right to choose. The report says that in 15 states, the following measures became law:

  • expand the pre-abortion waiting period requirement in South Dakota to make it more onerous than that in any other state, by extending the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requiring women to obtain counseling from a crisis pregnancy center in the interim;
  • expand the abortion counseling requirement in South Dakota to mandate that counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the abortion and that counseling include information published after 1972 on all the risk factors related to abortion complications, even if the data are scientifically flawed;
  • require the health departments in Utah and Virginia to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics;
  • revise the Utah abortion refusal clause to allow any hospital employee to refuse to “participate in any way” in an abortion;
  • limit abortion coverage in all private health plans in Utah, including plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and
  • revise the Mississippi sex education law to require all school districts to provide abstinence-only sex education while permitting discussion of contraception only with prior approval from the state.

The report continues;

In addition to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature, and some interesting trends are emerging. As a whole, the proposals introduced this year are more hostile to abortion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills introduced so far this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38% last year. Three topics—insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultrasound requirements—are topping the agenda in several states. At the same time, legislators are proposing little in the way of proactive initiatives aimed at expanding access to reproductive health –related services; this stands in sharp contrast to recent years when a range of initiatives to promote comprehensive sex education, permit expedited STI treatment for patients’ partners and ensure insurance coverage of contraception were adopted.

Four months, 916 bills introduced. Sounds like a new record is about to be set. Whatever happened to Roe v. Wade? You know, the 1973 decision by the Supreme Court that gives women the right under the 14th amendment of the Constitution to have a choice? The law that has guided this issue for the last four decades.

Why is Roe v. Wade now a mute issue?

 

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Abortion Featured House of Representatives South Dakota

Republicans Trying to Legalize Killing Abortion Doctors

If the Republicans in South Dakota gets their way, killing an abortion doctor will be legal. No, that wasn’t a misprint. A bill being pushed by House Republicans in South Dakota’s congress will redefine the term “justifiable homicide” to include killing anyone who brings harm to a fetus. The bill, HB 1170 has already passed the committee with a vote of 9 – 3, and will be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives for a final vote.

According to reports by Mother Jones;

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state’s legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person “while resisting an attempt to harm” that person’s unborn child or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Protecting the unborn fetus can be considered an admirable trait, but what happens after the baby is born and grows up to become… I don’t know, maybe… an abortion doctor? At what point is it really okay to protect the unborn but kill the living?

More on this story from Mother Jones here

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