SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – A federal judge in South Dakota ruled Aug. 20 that a 2005 South Dakota law requiring doctors to inform patients that abortion kills a human being is constitutional.
U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier handed down the decision in a lawsuit filed against the state by Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Schreier said that although doctors must use the term “human being,” it can be used in a “biological sense” and not an “ideological” one. The law specifies that a woman must be told that abortion “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.”
In the same ruling she overturned a requirement in the law that women be informed that abortion can spur suicidal thoughts, increasing the risk of suicide. She termed such disclosures “untruthful and misleading.”