A South Dakota group that is against abortion has sued to keep an abortion rights measure off the November ballot.
Life Defense Fund filed a complaint on Thursday saying that people who supported the bill did wrong things and that there were fake signatures and fraud. The group wants to get rid of or invalidate the effort.
Dakotans for Health put forward a measure for the Nov. 5 general election, and Secretary of State Monae Johnson approved it in May. About 54,000 signatures were turned in by people who supported the measure so that it could be put on the vote. About 35,000 people had to sign. For example, Johnson’s office thought that about 86% of signatures were valid.
Life Defense Fund said that Dakotans for Health didn’t file a document that petitioners’ circulators lived in the state, and they also said that petitioners didn’t always give circulators the required handout and left petition sheets unattended. Life Defense Fund also said that many more signatures were not real and that petitioners had lied to people about what they were signing.
“People should carefully look over Dakotan for Health’s comments and decide if they can be trusted.” “In the end, the Court will decide if this kind of illegal behavior can lead to the measure being put on the ballot,” Sara Frankenstein, an attorney for the Life Defense Fund, said in an email Monday.
The lawsuit from Life Defense Fund was called “a last-ditch effort to undermine the democratic process” by Dakotans for Health.
So far, they’ve done everything they could think of to keep people from voting this November. Now they’ve even tried the kitchen sink. “We are sure that the people of South Dakota, not the politicians, will be able to make this choice in November,” co-founder Rick Weiland said in a statement Friday.
In the first trimester, the bill says the state can’t regulate “a pregnant woman’s abortion decision and its effectuation.” But in the second trimester, it says the state can regulate “only in ways that are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.”
The constitutional change would let the state decide whether to allow or not allow abortions in the third trimester, “except when abortion is medically necessary, in the opinion of the woman’s doctor, to preserve the life or health of the pregnant woman.”
In South Dakota, abortion is illegal and a felony unless it is done to save the mother’s life. This is because of a law that went into action when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade of 1973.
The bill was opposed by South Dakota’s Republican-controlled legislature at the beginning of the year. The Legislature passed a rule that lets people who signed initiative petitions take their signatures off of them, as well as a resolution officially opposing the measure. The second one shouldn’t have any effect on the bill that voters will be considering.
The Life Defense Fund also wants to stop Dakotans for Health and its employees from supporting or spreading petitions or working on ballot initiatives for four years.
South Dakota is one of four states that will vote on bills in November to add abortion rights to their state constitutions. The other three are Colorado, Florida, and Maryland. Seven more states have petition drives to add questions like these.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, there have been seven statewide ballot measures that have been linked to abortion. Proponents of abortion rights have won all of them.
Source: AP News
