An open letter to Sen. Gordon Howie

January 31, 2009

Dear Sen. Howie,

This note is in response to your explanation of Senate Bill 92 at the Rapid City crackerbarrel this morning.

With all due respect, if you want to see people on both sides of the abortion issue to come together, a good first step would be being straight on the facts about Planned Parenthood.

Clients of Planned Parenthood have counseling available to them, in fact counseling and education are a large part of their activity. I honestly think asserting otherwise shows either a conscious disregard for the facts or a mendacious repeating of false talking points to get support for an idea by sowing confusion. I trust you just don't have the facts.

I strongly suspect that a main reason you are a vocal opponent of PP is not as much as to the services they provide but because you disagree with the unbiased, complete reproductive health care information and counseling they provide to young men and women.

In this time of economic challenge, I urge you to give this issue a rest and do more to support women and encourage sexual responsibility and discourage abortion in other ways... radical ways such as supporting health education and working to improve our economy so couples are more able to afford reproductive health care and support their families.

The majority of voters in South Dakota have shown they agree by decisively defeating abortion bans, twice. Improving the economic lot of South Dakotans would be a much more effective way to reduce abortions than fruitless efforts to make South Dakota a nanny state for more than half of our population.

Thank you.