Lawyers, calling South Dakota’s abortion ban a ‘miscarriage of justice,’ form Lawyers for Freedom Amendment G
Calling South Dakota’s near total abortion ban “a miscarriage of justice with dangerous, unpredictable effects on health care for women and girls,” Freedom Coalition Chair and lawyer Nancy Turbak Berry, along with lawyers Renae Christensen of Sioux Falls and Stephanie Pochop of Gregory, today announces formation of Lawyers for Freedom Amendment G (the amendment’s petition-signing phase is pictured above in an image from the Dakotans for Health’s Facebook page).
“No state in America is more extreme than ours in banning abortion,” Pochop said. “No one is more vulnerable than we are to the legal disasters that total bans create. Previously routine reproductive health care was jeopardized because doctors are afraid of prosecution. Victims of rape are being forced by law to carry to term. We must reverse this march to extremism by passing Freedom Amendment G now.”
Since the implementation of South Dakota’s abortion ban, a recent CNN study reveals that nearly 65,000 pregnancies resulting from rape have occurred in states with similar bans.
“Lawyers can have an important role in responding to the campaign of lies opponents are waging about Amendment G,” Turbak Berry said. “They can help explain why outrageous claims made by right-to-life folks are irrational scare tactics with no basis in law or fact. Lawyers can help remind voters that Amendment G restores the law in South Dakota to where it was for 50 years, before Roe v. Wade was overturned.”
Christensen and Pochop, who will direct the newly formed Lawyers for Freedom Amendment G group, said this is a battle that must be won.
“Our job as attorneys is to use the law to protect our clients,” they said in a joint statement. “When instead the law threatens them, like South Dakota’s extreme abortion ban clearly does, we look for ways to restore their rights. Freedom Amendment G does that. It protects individual freedom against politicians’ efforts to take abortion from the arenas of faith and personal opinions, where it belongs, and write it into law, where it does not belong.”
“Make no mistake. South Dakota’s abortion ban is the government telling people what to do with their own bodies. That is big government overreach,”Christensen said. “We must defend women, girls, couples, and their doctors, so they can make decisions about health care and childbearing free of government restrictions on what care is available. The government has no business sticking its nose into people’s medical records or controlling their choices about medical care,” she added.
Turbak Berry said the ban is a clear violation of human rights.
“Using the force of law to promote a personal religious belief that a microscopic fertilized egg is a total person, so the woman who carries it — even as the result of rape — may never seek an abortion offends concepts of freedom and liberty absolutely central to our constitutional system,” she said. “It allows the personal opinions of one group to take away the freedoms of another, and that is flat-out wrong.”
“Extremism is dangerous, and I can tell you we lawyers are concerned by what we see happening in this state as right-to-life zealots control the South Dakota Legislature and use their legislative ban to force their personal opinions on the entire state,” Turbak Berry said. “That is why South Dakota needs constitutional protection of women’s freedom, which only Freedom Amendment G can offer. Freedom begs for this Amendment, and I think most people who study the law agree.”
Turbak Berry, Christensen, and Pochop urge lawyers who share these concerns to join the Lawyers for Freedom Amendment G. Sign up and join the fight to repeal South Dakota’s radical abortion ban and pass Freedom Amendment G.
Dakotans for Health is a grassroots organization focused on health care and protecting the democratic process. The organization was instrumental in the successful 2022 campaign to expand Medicaid coverage to 52,000 low-income South Dakotans. Dakotans for Health is dedicated to ensuring all South Dakotans have access to the care they need, no matter who they are, what they look like, or how much money they have.
