By By Caitlin Walsh, Columnist
After a bill in South Dakota proposing expansion of justifiable homicides to include the murder of abortion workers made nationwide news, both pro-life and pro-choice proponents agreed that the bill was poorly conceived from the beginning.
Somehow the bill passed the state's judiciary committee last week. Its shaky rhetoric establishes justifiable homicide of an abortion worker as the lawful defense of one's self, spouse, parent, child, master, mistress, servant, or an unborn child that belongs to that person. By the time the rest of the nation heard about this bill, it was branded as the bill that would allow the murder of abortion workers.
This notion isn't far from the truth. However, there are deeper consequences to such a bill being passed. The bill would not only affect abortion workers, but also the outcome of every murder trial in the state as well.
Trials would become ten times more complicated as the defense would scramble to use the bill's muddled diction and vague definitions as defense.
Prosecutors would have to wade through every last detail of the case in order to prove not only that the defendant did commit homicide, but that it wasn't justified in any sense of the bill. The burden of proof for the prosecution would become even heavier.
The bill also heavily favors the "unborn child clause," which treats a fetus as a whole person in the eyes of the law. Looking at the bill's origins shows that this clause was its basic purpose.
If one was to read the text of the short resolution, they would find the phrase "unborn child" three times – including once in the title – before any other relations are even mentioned. It's also no surprise that this bill passed out a 12 person committee, with nine republicans voting "yes" and the three democrats voting "no." Thankfully, this bill was shelved indefinitely while lawmakers go back to the diction drawing board.
The Republican pro-life agenda, when taken to such extremes, can have unforeseen consequences. Were party leaders really so blinded by their objective of ratifying more pro-life legislation that they never stopped to consider the possible outcomes of their vague wording?
Perhaps they have become single-issue politicians, much the same way some people are single-issue voters. If they really have set their sights so narrowly on an issue such as abortion, at the expense of other issues, then they are no better than the lobbyists who wait for the legislators every day, hoping to get their cause heard.