South Dakota enacts far-reaching abortion ban.(News)

The sweeping abortion ban signed into law last month in South Dakota has sent shock waves through reproductive medicine and could lead to a Supreme Court showdown on the legality of abortion.

The law makes it a felony to perform an abortion except in cases where the mother's life is in danger and prohibits the administering, prescribing, procuring, or selling of any substance that terminates a pregnancy. But the law does allow the sale of contraceptives that can be administered before a pregnancy "could be determined through conventional medical testing."

The "Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act," which is set to take effect in July, will likely face an immediate court challenge from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Planned Parenthood's Sioux Falls clinic is the only abortion clinic in the state, and officials there have vowed to exhaust all legal options to prevent the ban from taking effect.

Physicians on both sides of the debate said that they see the new law as a watershed event.

"This is very dangerous," said Dr. Warren Hern, director of the Boulder (Colo.) Abortion Clinic. "You cannot practice medicine in this kind of an environment."

Antiabortion advocates have made abortion an ideological issue, he said, instead of a public health issue. Dr. Hern said he suspects that even if the law doesn't go into effect, many women in South Dakota will think the procedure is illegal.

Even without a ban, access is limited because fewer and fewer physicians want to perform abortions, Dr. Hern said. Performing abortions is the way to the bottom in medicine, he said, and physicians who specialize in performing abortion have become targets for assassination.