This is why states back East– like Georgia– wanted to expel Native Americans from within their boundaries in the 19th century. This is land within their boundaries that they cannot control.

According to federal law as it applies to “domestic, dependent nations” such as Indian tribes, as long as the federal government allows family planning clinics, then the Pine Ridge reservation cannot be blocked from building a family planning clinic within even a state such as South Dakota.

I say good for her. Chairman Fire Thunder is taking a principled stand against irrationality. Frankly, under treaty obligations set up when the Sioux ceded their claims to most of the Plains in exchange for money secured by the federal government in a trust fund for the Lakota people’s benefit, the Sioux people should have funds for such a clinic. Not to mention electricity and telephone service and running water.

What? You didn’t know that the money is missing? Try typing “Indian trust fund lawsuit” into google. You’ll get an education there, my friends.

But back to the subject at hand. My check is in the mail.

Native Americans have always been at the mercy of IHS for health care (unless, I suppose, they can afford private care, not often likely) . IHS has only allowed twenty abortions in the last 25 years to Native American women.( IHS has a rape and life threat clause. )

So, if procuring an abortion has always been difficult for Native American women, as this would indicate, why haven’t they put a Planned Parenthood on the res before now?

Unless they have decided simply that, like casinos, PP can become a revenue source for the Oglalas? I am assuming that prior to now, perhaps a lack of support for the idea was a deterrent, but now, with potential revenue, there is support?

For a glimpse of South Dakota’s future we need only to look across the Atlantic at Portugal, which has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe (although, it should be noted, at least Portugal’s abortion prohibitions provide for an exception in the case of rape).

Today, roughly 40,000 Portuguese women have illegal abortions each year, according to women’s rights groups. Thousands more go abroad for the procedure, including to neighboring Spain, where the abortion law is interpreted far more liberally.

Moreover, pro-choice groups assert that hundreds of Portuguese women end up in hospitals each year because of complications resulting from illegal abortions. “The women who have abortions are the poorest, the youngest, the oldest, the violence victims,” said Maria Jose Magalhaes, a Porto-based member of UMAR, a women’s rights lobby group. “The others — the middle class, the literate women — they have other possibilities,” including access to private clinics staffed by competent medical personnel.

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050218-010804-3725r.htm

Cecilia Thunder Fire is doing an admirable thing, stepping up to the plate in an attempt to assist the South Dakotan women who would suffer most from the abortion ban: the socially and physically disadvantaged, and the victims of violence and abuse. But she should not be forced by the state of South Dakota to bear that burden alone.

South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds, in his statement accompanying the signing of the anti-abortion legislation, said the following:

In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society. The sponsors and supporters of this bill believe that abortion is wrong because unborn children are the most vulnerable and most helpless persons in our society. I agree with them.

It’s an admirable goal, to protect “the most vulnerable and most helpless” in society, and it is one that South Dakota is failing at. Miserably.

Ginmar, forgive my ignorance, but what does ‘NOSPAM’ translate to? @nospamyahoo.com?

It translates to “cheap spam protection from page-scanning address harvesters who, lacking human intellect, are completely unable to remove a fairly obvious token before parsing the address.”