Good Reads Library
Dear Governor Rounds
Dear Governor Rounds,
Well, you've done it. You've put a law in that will keep South Dakota's women from having safe legal abortions unless their lives are at risk.
A friend of mine sent me a funny e-mail about parenting, but it had the following facts in it:
The government recently calculated the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 and came up with $160, 140.00 for a middle income family. That doesn't even touch college tuition. It translates into 8,896 a year, $741.38 a month, or $171.08 a week. That's $24.24 a day!
So tell me, Governor. When are you and your legislature planning on passing some legislation that gives the parents who have to raise all those children you are going to "save" that additional income?
Where's the billl to make sure every one of those pregnant women has fully funded prenatal care? And hospital care for the birth? And post partum care? For that matter, I'm sure even as we speak you are planning to make sure that these babies have medical care, no matter what problems they have when they are born.
Where's the bill that will give those women PAID maternity leaves so they can afford to care for those little bundles of joy you are insisting they bring into the world? Or for the high quality child care they will need if they have to go out into the work place and earn that extra $24.24 a day?
Have you planned for all the extra money you're going to have to put into social services? Or are you expecting that every woman who has one of these "saved" babies is going to be a fabulous mother, no matter what?
Somehow I don't think you're thinking about the rape victim, the wife whose husband abuses her or the victims of child abuse and incest. Or the teenager who's just too damn young to have a baby, let alone to make all the adult decisions necessary to raise one.
Governor, I really believe in the words of another former Governor, Bill Clinton, who said that abortions should be "safe,legal and rare".
No one wants to have an abortion. But if a woman does make that decision, she should be able to do it legally and SAFELY.
All you and your cronies are doing is pushing abortions back into the shadows, where they have existed from the dawn of time. And women are going to die.
But then again, we're talking about women and babies, not UNBORN babies.
Apparently they're the only ones with lives that matter as far as you're concerned.
P.S. I'm looking forward to the additional money you'll be allotting family planning services, the much more explicit sex education classes your schools will offer, and the laws requiring men to get vasectomies if their wives demand it.....................
