The story behind South Dakota’s abortion ban. Click on this link, and go read the whole thing.  Whether you approve of abortion or not, is this how you want your laws being made?

  If the “pro-life lobby is so righteous, how come they have to delete testimony:

The dissenters--Linda Holcomb, a family therapist; Dr. Maria Bell, the sole gynecologist on the committee; Senator Stanford Adelstein; and Looby--say the final report distorts the information and testimony the task force surveyed. Though the testimony was evenly divided between citizen and expert witnesses in favor of legal abortion and against it, most of the testimony in favor of legal abortion was omitted from the final report or discredited to what Looby considers a libelous degree.

Claim not to remember the testimony they are deleting:

Hunt is evasive when questioned about this omission. "There were a lot of statements made that didn't make it into the report," he said. "I don't remember that many doctors making that kind of a statement." But an examination of the testimony sheds light on the contention: Of the nine physicians who testified, eight claimed it was not medically advisable to create an environment where abortion was illegal.

Falsely represent testimony, skew testimony,

Missing testimony isn't the only troubling aspect of the report; the witnesses were routinely misrepresented. For instance, the report claims that "close to 2,000 women who have had abortions made statements detailing their experience...over 99 percent of them testified that abortion is destructive of the rights, interests, and health of women." These figures actually refer to 1,500 affidavits originally collected as part of an Internet campaign, brought in by a Texas-based litigation firm, The Justice Foundation, and its antiabortion offspring, Operation Outcry, during the October 21 meeting of the task force. There were also seven out-of-state Operation Outcry representatives invited to testify before the task force, even though the day was reserved for South Dakotan testimony only. Though Hunt says he can't remember who had invited Operation Outcry, Allison, the self-identified "pro-life" chair of the committee who often voted with the prochoice minority, says that Hunt was responsible for bringing in all the pro-life witnesses. "He may not remember, but I'm guessing he knows," she added.

Just plain lie about science

Looby says that she and the other minority members spent hours trying to correct errors in the report during the final meeting but were routinely voted down. The final straw was the report's contention that there is a link between breast cancer and abortion. The report claimed that "reasons to suspect such a link are sufficiently sound," though nearly all the evidence the group had accumulated supported the contrary. Looby and Bell made a motion to amend the claim, which was tabled without discussion. At that point, Looby, Adelstein, Holcomb and Bell left the meeting in protest. The final report was then endorsed nine to one, with Allison the lone dissenter.

And deny responsibility for writing the resulting legislation?

No one claimed specific authorship of the report. "We were supposed to sit down, go through it, critique it, make motions, and we didn't know who wrote it because no one would say," Allison recollects. "I think there were several authors, but the only knowledge I have of who authored it is what I've read in the paper, honestly, because no one would 'fess up during our meeting." Hunt, whose statement on the report's authorship is "I wasn't necessarily part of any of the drafting," contends that it was a group effort and that several members had been e-mailing drafts back and forth before the final meeting. "There were probably six or seven members who wrote different sections of it and then pooled their information," he says. "I know that there were three or four other members who kind of went through the draft trying to tie it all together." Neither Looby nor the other surprised members were privy to the alleged e-mail drafts. "We got the feeling there was a lot of national-level professional input," Looby says.