South Dakota - the land of "Great Faces, Great Places," according to its official Web site. Well, it's not just Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills and the Buffalo Roundup that are stirring talk about this sparsely populated state these days. South Dakota is now the hotbed of the abortion rights debate.

According to the 2004 U.S. Census Bureau, 373,000 inhabitants of South Dakota are female. The governor of the state, Mike Rounds, wants to limit women's choices regarding abortion. It is his belief that every fertilized human egg should be allowed to develop and be brought into this world, regardless of the mother's situation.

Mr. Rounds wants to be David, slinging his rock at Goliath - or at least at Roe vs. Wade. He hopes this will be the start of an avalanche of anti-abortion proceedings needed to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that declared abortion legal in 1973.

As a woman, a mother and a citizen who votes, I am appalled at his actions. His actions tell me that he believes that women cannot make serious life decisions by themselves. His actions tell me that he does not care about women in cases of rape or incest. Yes, these are the smallest minority of all abortion cases. The fact is, however, that they do occur, and the recently signed bill in South Dakota makes no exception for terminating a pregnancy resulting from those two heinous events.

How can legislators sleep at night knowing they could be enacting a law that would force a victim of rape or incest to give birth to her perpetrator's child? Imagine not having a choice about that.

Even more frightening to me is the question of how long this backlash against women will continue. Will the Comstock Law of 1873 be enforced once again? That little gem of legal precedent outlawed as obscene the distribution of information about birth control. For a ridiculously long time, no one - not even physicians - could legally give women advice regarding reproduction.

In the 1900s, Margaret Sanger, a public health care nurse, realized that successful family planning would be a necessity in order for society to advance. Along with countless others, she helped women take control of their reproductive lives. Did you know that at least one state outlawed birth control between married couples in the U.S. until the Supreme Court ruled it so, via Griswold vs. Connecticut, in 1965?

Women who seek abortions, not only in South Dakota, must submit to long waiting periods, partisan counseling and notification of whoever else is thought to have some legal claim to the fetus. Once again, women are not allowed to make choices by themselves regarding their bodies. They are manipulated, cajoled and encouraged to see what abortion opponents call both sides of the issue, which is simply double speak for "see it our way."

Women are not stupid. They know the price that comes not only with childbirth, but with child rearing. Yet there are still many people who know nothing about birth control. As a country, we are still woefully behind many nations who educate their young people about sex.

Right here in Collin County we have seen an increase in the number of young people with sexually transmitted diseases, a byproduct of a weak sex-ed curriculum in our public schools.

If all the energy that people put into keeping boys and girls away from sex education was reversed, we would see an immediate drop in the abortion rate. Knowledge is a powerful thing. It encourages people to make more responsible choices.

By the time a woman shows up at a hospital or clinic in order to have an abortion, she has already made her choice. Instead of standing in her way and casting that first stone, why don't we offer to help her through this difficult time and make certain it never happens again? With facts about the reproductive process, birth control that works and no soul-damning or finger-pointing, we could offer her what women have fought so long and hard for this past century.

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