South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants to follow Texas in protecting unborn babies from abortion in her state.
On Thursday, she ordered an immediate review of the new Texas heartbeat law as well as South Dakota pro-life laws by her office’s Unborn Child Advocate Mark Miller, KELO News reports.
“Following the Supreme Court’s decision to leave the pro-life Texas law in place, I have directed the Unborn Child Advocate in my office to immediately review the new Texas law and current South Dakota laws to make sure we have the strongest pro life laws on the books …” Noem said in a statement on Twitter.
A pro-life Republican, Noem took action after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block Texas from enforcing its new heartbeat law late Wednesday. The Texas law, which bans abortions once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable, has the potential to save tens of thousands of babies’ lives every year.
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Here’s more from the local news:
KELOLAND News asked whether the move indicates she is open to South Dakota following the example of Texas. Replied her communications director Ian Fury, “(T)he tweet speaks for itself.”
… The South Dakota Department of Health reported 125 abortions occurred in South Dakota during calendar 2020, which was affected by the coronavirus pandemic; for the six months from April through September, a total of three abortions were performed. By comparison, there were annual totals of 414 in 2019 and 382 in 2018.
Earlier this year, the South Dakota legislature unanimously passed a pro-life law to protect unborn babies with Down syndrome from discriminatory abortions.
Though about a dozen states have passed heartbeat laws, Texas is the first to be allowed to enforce its law. The others have been blocked by the courts.
Near midnight on Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled against a request from pro-abortion groups to temporarily block enforcement of the pro-life law. The majority ruled that Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro-abortion groups did not provide sufficient reasons to justify blocking the law.
Texas abortion facilities stopped aborting unborn babies after six weeks of pregnancy Wednesday, but the court battle is far from over. Though the Supreme Court refused to block enforcement of the heartbeat law, the justices made it clear that they were not ruling on its constitutionality. The case now returns to the lower courts for consideration.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court took away the states’ ability to protect unborn babies from abortion under Roe v. Wade, and instead forced states to legalize abortion on demand. Roe made the United States one of only seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions after 20 weeks. The court is scheduled to hear a Mississippi case in the fall that challenges this precedent.
Since Roe, nearly 63 million unborn babies have been legally aborted in the U.S. Polls consistently show that a strong majority of Americans oppose abortions in the second and third trimesters and many support heartbeat laws that protect unborn babies at their earliest stage of life.
