WARNING: This is a Rant

This is a rant. A major rant. I don't normally rant online. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to cool down before posting. If you don’t want to read it, switch to another webpage now. You’ve had fair warning.

South Dakota, already the state with the strictest abortion regulations, has passed a controversial law that prevents doctors from performing an abortion except in cases where the mother's life is in danger.

Bill Napoli, a Republican state senator for South Dakota insists that exceptions “might” be made for rape or incest under the provision that it protects the mother's life. When asked for a scenario in which an exception for rape or incest may be invoked, he responded.

BILL NAPOLI: “A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad “as you can possibly make It”, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”
link to news coverage

I'm so upset about his comments I can barely even speak. Essentially he is saying he only believes in abortion for "religious virgins" who've been brutalized “as bad as you can possibly make it”. How brutal? Just being raped isn't enough? What does the rapist have to do, cut off your tits for you to qualify? Or maybe even that is not enough. What if you are only brutalized “almost” as bad as you can possibly make it? Does your rape not qualify? Many incest victims would not qualify at all.

If you are married, divorced, non-religious or otherwise a non-virgin no option could even be considered for you. What if you are a virgin who wasn’t planning on saving herself for marriage, but hadn’t had a relationship that was special enough for sexual relations at the time you were raped? Would the fact that you "might" have had sex in the future throw you out of the pool for consideration of your case? Would you have been any less raped or brutalized? What is a virgin anyway? Someone who has never had sex, or someone who no longer has a hymen? There are many ways to lose a hymen that have nothing to do with sex. If you were raped once before, would all future rapes not qualify for help of any kind?

Religious? By whose definition? And “why” should religion have any impact on if you are considered a serious rape victim or not? Whose religion? Only his? What about pagans, Jews, Unitarians, Buddhists, Hindus? What if you're atheist, or a deist? Are church attending lesbians considered non-religious? How do you even measure how religious someone is? Only God knows that. Is this man God now? Heaven forbid that a woman miss a single Sunday of church. That might disqualify her.

What kind of insensitive, chauvinistic, patriarchal pig is this idiot? He doesn't have a clue what rape is.

I've counseled with rape victims. His cold stance shows not one iota of mercy or compassion and is victimizing women even further. What do you bet his next bill will be to take support money away from “greedy sinful women” who have children out of wedlock. (We already have a law that says that pharmacists by conscience could refuse to fill a prescription for contraceptives. There is a move from some groups who have worked on this to say that there should be no contraceptives, that sexual intercourse is for the purpose of reproduction. Or that only married women should have access to them.)

Before this legislation, South Dakota was already perhaps the most difficult place in the country to get an abortion. There was a 24-hour waiting period and mandatory counseling to discourage the procedure. The law required parental notification in cases where the patient was a minor. Only one clinic, Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls, offered the procedure. Often patients, including rape and incest victims, had to go past picketers in order to gain access to the facility. (No medical privacy at all)

I don't think any sane human being is "for" abortion. Most Americans appear to be somewhere in the middle on the issue. I do feel that only the woman is capable of making that critical choice. Would any of us want a decision this serious going before a governmental or judicial committee if the rape victim was our daughter, our mother, our grandmother, or ourselves?

Not me.

At best the government does a bungling bureaucratically constipated job of handling the most basic of domestic services. God forbid that they end up the decision makers in something this serious.

South Dakota now has the same abortion restrictions as the Taliban:
Summary of Abortion Law Around the World

A new term for extreme brutality:
Napoli definition