Aborting in South Dakota
The WaPo headline caught my eye: "S.D. Makes Abortion Rare Through Laws And Stigma." It's about the difficulty of getting an abortion in South Dakota. The state has only one abortion provider (in Sioux Falls). The headline says there's a connection between the lack of providers and the restrictive laws, but the story does a poor job of establishing any such connection whatsoever (indeed, the story scarcely argues the point at all).
The headline and story also say that most doctors don't want to risk the stigma of providing abortions. This, the story says, contributes to the provider shortage. That's more believable, but not much. Why would a doctor want to avoid the stigma? Because it might drive away other patients? If that's the case, why doesn't he just open an abortion mill, providing pretty much nothing but abortions, like many doctors in other parts of the country have done? Abortion mill patients, after all, don't care about the doctor's stigma, and such mills have proven lucrative.
There has to be demand, though. And therein, I suspect, is the simple answer to South Dakota's lack of abortion providers: "There aren't enough women getting abortions in South Dakota to justify full-time abortion mills."
But if that's the case, why doesn't the WaPo article mention it? The article states that 15-20 women seek an abortion each week in South Dakota. This number wouldn't be enough to justify one abortion mill, much less two. Instead of (i) drawing a wholly-unsubstantiated connection between restrictive laws and the availability of abortion and (ii) talking about the "stigma," why doesn't the reporter make the more obvious connection that the lack of demand in South Dakota results in a lack of providers?
The answer is: "The point of the story isn't South Dakota. It's Alito." Here's a passage from the middle of the story:
As national leaders on both sides of the abortion debate focus on the upcoming Supreme Court nomination hearings of Samuel A. Alito Jr., they are watching states such as South Dakota pass more and more restrictions that might be upheld by a newly constituted, more conservative Supreme Court.
"Samuel Alito wrote the blueprint 20 years ago on how to dismantle and eventually overturn Roe," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, referring to a memo Alito wrote in 1985 in which he mentioned passing restrictions on abortion as a way to mitigate the effects of Roe v. Wade . "If he is confirmed, Alito could cast the decisive vote that allows additional attacks on women's reproductive freedom from the states to stand."
