There are a couple of points worth adding to Pema's excellent post below. First of all, accepting the necessity of actually looking at what the proposed statute says rather than what what Phil Jensen claims that he meant, legislators in South Dakota have apparently shelved the bill, which was strongly criticized by the governor. So Sheppard's reporting had a real effect.
On Pema's larger point, I was reminded of this recent comment from Time editor Amy Sullivan:
Judging by my in-box, Dems and choice groups see extreme abortion bills as fund raising bonanza. Just politics, but still depressing.
I find this kind of aversion to conflict, which permeates elite pundit discourse about abortion, very strange. The rise in anti-choice radicalism isn't some figment of the imagination of pro-choicers, let alone something that pro-choicers have wished for; it's real. And while the effects of anti-choice strategies are somewhat (but definitely not entirely) mitigated by the Supreme Court, with only five clear pro-Roe votes and Ruth Bader Ginsburg apparently not retiring before the 2012 elections, even this protection is far from secure. The fact that pro-choice groups are mobilizing in the face of a real threat is precisely the opposite of "depressing."
--Scott Lemieux
