REVERSING ROE.(Roe v. Wade; Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act challenges abortion law in South Dakota)

One Friday morning a few weeks ago, a young man named Justin Huck stood in the chilly shade just outside the county administration building in Sioux Falls, watching an older man climb stiffly from a pickup truck in the parking lot. The man was wearing a fleece vest and a National Rifle Association cap, and he walked as though both knees hurt. Huck pulled out one of the three clipboards he had tucked under one arm. "Sir, excuse me," he said. "Would you help us put our state's ban on abortion up for a vote in November?"

The man stopped, studying Huck and his clipboard. "The South Dakota legislature just passed a ban on abortion that makes no exception for the health of the mother, or even for rape or incest," Huck said. "It's pretty extreme. We're trying to put it on the ballot. Let the people vote on it."

The man pushed his cap brim up. "A ban on abortions," he said. "So you can't have one. You got to have the baby, no matter what."

Huck said that was correct. The man was quiet for a moment, and then reached for the clipboard. "I know my wife doesn't agree with that," he said. He signed the petition, printed his address, nodded to Huck, and disappeared inside. A slender young woman with short hair and a snazzy red jacket strode up. Huck made his pitch. "Nope," she said. An old woman, with rheumy eyes and salon-smoothed white curls: "Yes," she said sharply, snatching the clipboard from Huck's hand.

A woman in bluejeans and thong sandals hurried by; she started to open the building's front door, but when Huck approached she hesitated. She clasped her hands together. She said, "Oh," in a way that made it seem an unusually thick and complicated word, and she stared at the petition's boldfaced lettering, which begins, "HB 1215: ABORTION--CRIMES AND OFFENSES." I had been in South Dakota for a week by then, driving three hundred and fifty miles from the western side of the state to the eastern, and the grave expression on this woman's face was one I had seen in coffee shops and living rooms and farm-town businesses and the offices of a half-dozen pastors, including two Presbyterian ministers who share the same congregation, admire each other, and argued in strained, low voices as they sat side by side. "It's just that--I do respect life," the woman said to Huck. "But what if the girl was raped by her father, you know? There have to be exceptions. Until you've walked a mile in somebody else's shoes, you never know--but I also think there are a lot of people who need to take more responsibility for their actions--"

The woman took a deep breath. "Just to let the people vote on it," Huck said evenly, and she signed. After she left, he said that he had been at the University of South Dakota a few days earlier and had instigated an emotional verbal brawl by bringing the petitions into a fraternity house. "Half of them signed and half of them didn't," he said. "But that's one thing I love about this. I was, like, Wow, when I leave they're going to be talking about something besides booze." We looked at his clipboard. He had collected sixteen names in an hour. If by June 19th the petition drive, which began three months ago, proves to have gathered the signatures of at least 16,728 registered voters--more than twice that number have already been collected, and the South Dakota secretary of state's office is completing the verification this week--the November 7th general ballot will ask the state's voters to decide whether "the termination of an unborn human life," as South Dakota House Bill 1215 puts it, should be a felony under state law unless it is undertaken to save a pregnant woman's life.

The bill, which was signed into law in March by South Dakota's governor, Mike Rounds, is flagrantly unconstitutional; that was supposed to have been its point. In plain violation of the rules established by Roe v. Wade in 1973, when the Supreme Court declared that abortion is protected by the Constitution and must be legal in every state, the South Dakota law prohibits abortion "throughout the entire embryonic and fetal ages of the unborn child from fertilization to full gestation and childbirth." The legislators who wrote HB 1215, as the law is popularly known in South Dakota, assumed that it would face an immediate legal challenge; that a federal judge would declare it unconstitutional and block its enforcement before the July 1st startup date; and that it would then begin a journey through the appellate system and toward the Supreme Court. "We didn't expect it to go into effect," Bill Napoli, a Republican state senator and one of the law's outspoken defenders, says. "We only wanted to challenge Roe v. Wade."