Roxy Hammond

The South Dakota State Legislature has been busy regulating our sex lives again.

The mostly-male legislature passed/failed two measures this session-one that requires a doctor to offer a woman a view of her ultrasound before her abortion (SB-88) and one that would have removed legal protection to pharmacists that deny medication, including birth control, if they feel it could be used for suicide, or it goes against their conscience (SB-164).

I will give you three guesses which one they passed and which one they failed.

This scares me a little bit, for two reasons.

First, that the S.D. legislature has nothing better to do with their time than make sure that a woman signs a paper that says she was offered an ultrasound (which is already regular practice). This is their idea of preventing abortions. If the woman sees her baby and feels so awful about it, she will carry it to term. We are giving her the ‘opportunity’ to think it over. Voile, pro-life via guilt-trip.

Secondly, these two actions are completely counterproductive to each other. I know that it may not have passed through the morally blinded minds of some of these legislators, but preventing women from getting birth control is not going to cut down on unwanted pregnancies. They’re not going to be like, ‘Well, shucks. This pharmacist is morally opposed to my birth control pills (which, might I add, he/she has no real idea why the person is taking them); so I might as well be celibate!’

This is reality calling, please wake up.

Now, I am not advocating abortion. And I am not advocating promiscuity. What I am advocating is allowing people to take responsibility for their own lives. The ones that are attempting to get these birth control pills are the ones that are trying to prevent conceiving the babies that may then be aborted. I have been saying this from the start-if you want to reduce abortion, do not make it illegal, make it easier to prevent.

I am okay with people having moral values. In fact, I encourage it. But please do not start legislating them on everyone else, in hopes that by ignoring the problem, we will make it go away.

Humans are naturally sexual creatures. This has been the case for hundreds of years. Suddenly denying it for the sake of morality is not going to create some wide-sweeping change in our societal norms. In fact, if anything, you are only going to make things worse. We are a society that does not like being told what to do, especially in the bedroom.

I really wish the S.D. legislature would take a step back and work to change the problem from the inside, instead of trying to control it from the outside. South Dakotans have plenty of other problems to address, other than our concerns about who gets an abortion or who is on the pill.

Let people make their own decisions in life. Let them clean up their own messes. Stop treating women as if we cannot make our own decisions and need the moral conscience of someone else to lead the way.

And ask yourself, would this be the case if men could get pregnant?

I didn’t think so.

#1.882518:1072751925.jpg:Hammond, Roxy.jpg:Roxy Hammond, Sarcastic Cynicisms: