Two years ago, South Dakota voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed ban on abortions that proponents had hoped would set up a Supreme Court showdown over Roe vs. Wade.
Next month, the state ballot will include another abortion ban with similar goals -- but observers say this one is far more likely to pass.
The new ballot measure would allow for abortions in the case of rape and incest, exceptions that were not in the 2006 version. The absence of such exceptions is believed to have doomed the earlier version to failure.
"They said we'd gone too far, that we had to have exceptions for rape and incest," said Leslee Unruh, an antiabortion activist who has backed both measures.
This year's measure permits abortion in cases of rape -- provided the mother identifies the violator, a DNA test proves it is his child and the procedure occurs in the first 20 weeks -- and incest.
But opponents contend the initiative does not provide as much leeway as advertised.
"They tried to twist it to make it seem like there are exceptions, but there are not exceptions," said Jan Nicolay, a former state legislator who is co-chairwoman of South Dakota for Healthy Families, which opposes the initiative.
Though the initiative allows an abortion to protect the mother's health, abortion rights advocates say the standard is impossibly high: the threat of a major organ failure. They note that a pregnant woman with breast cancer, for example, couldn't seek chemotherapy or other treatment that could cause a miscarriage because an organ was not immediately at risk.
They also have publicized a memo from attorneys for the state's largest hospital chain that warns Measure 11 "will require a physician to choose between possibly committing a felony or subjecting a pregnant woman to a higher degree of medical risk than what would otherwise be clinically desirable."
The attacks frustrate Unruh, who hoped for a straightforward discussion of whether voters wanted unfettered abortion access. "The South Dakota law is a reasonable law," she said.
But the continuing abortion battles in South Dakota show that abortion is not a black and white issue, said Elizabeth T. Smith, a political science professor at the University of South Dakota. "The average citizen doesn't have a straight up or down vote on abortion," Smith said. "There are gradations of support based on different circumstances."
