Dakotans for Health Executive Director Rick Weiland said opponents to a ballot initiative to reinstate abortion rights in South Dakota are “desperate.” Photo by Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight.
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of conversations about voter-initiated efforts to restore abortion access across the country.
Unlike other abortion-rights initiatives across the country, major reproductive rights groups haven’t backed the effort to restore access in South Dakota.
But that hasn’t stopped Dakotans for Health — a ballot question committee behind a measure that is set to appear on the November ballot — from galvanizing voters in the state, where abortion is banned unless the mother’s life is at risk. South Dakota enacted a trigger law, first passed by lawmakers in 2005, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.
The ballot question asks voters to ban legislators from regulating abortion until the end of the first trimester, allow regulations during the second trimester “in ways that are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman” and let the state prohibit abortion in the third trimester unless the procedure is necessary to save the life or health of a pregnant patient.
Despite the lack of support from major organizations, the group submitted more than 55,000 petition-signatures to election officials in May, South Dakota Searchlight reported. About 46,000 of those signatures were from registered voters, even though the group only needed roughly 35,000 valid signatures to make the ballot.
Anti-abortion groups have mobilized against the measure. Republican Rep. Jon Hansen introduced a bill this year allowing voters to withdraw their signatures from petitions. GOP Gov. Kristi Noem signed the measure into law in March, along with approving legislation that directed health officials to create a video explaining the state’s abortion ban.
Hansen is also co-chair of the Life Defense Fund, a group that Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson called “scammers” and accused its members of “impersonating” her staff during calls that encouraged voters to remove their signatures from the petition, Searchlight reported. (Johnson asked the attorney general to investigate the calls, but he said no laws were broken and the anti-abortion group identified themselves as volunteers.)
With a few months left until Election Day, Dakotans for Health is focused on encouraging people to vote “yes” for Amendment G. Last month, it launched the Freedom Amendment Coalition led by former Democratic state lawmaker Nancy Turbak Berry. Republicans and doctors have announced their support to restore abortion access in South Dakota, too.
States Newsroom spoke to Dakotans for Health leader Rick Weiland, a Sioux Falls resident who unsuccessfully ran for Congress three times as a Democrat, about the grassroots campaign.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
The casual reader may be surprised to find out that you, a 65-year-old father of five, have spearheaded a campaign to restore abortion rights in South Dakota. So why did you decide to organize the ballot measure?
I have two daughters who are of child-bearing years. I have a granddaughter who’s 11, and I think about the poor kid that was raped in Ohio and had to go to Indiana to get an abortion, and I have a zillion nieces. Abortion rights are human rights in so many ways. When you look at the fact that women had these rights for 50 years and, with the change in the makeup of the court, they were eviscerated, and now we’re living in the most restrictive state in the country.
We have, with the trigger law, an exception for the life of the mother, right? But we still don’t know what that would constitute. Even after Dobbs and the trigger law kicking in, we couldn’t get anything through the legislature — because of the Right to Life lobby — to give doctors some peace of mind that they could help their patients. Finally, the legislature, which by the way is made up of 94 Republicans and 11 Democrats, allocated $100,000 to the state Department of Health to work with the governor and the attorney general to develop some kind of video that will instruct doctors on what they can and can’t do. Doctors are still operating under a pretty risky situation, and you hear a lot of stories about women having to travel out of state for help. It’s just a mess out here and for me, it checked a lot of boxes, in terms of us getting involved.
If approved, the ballot measure would allow abortion with no restrictions from the state legislature up to the end of the first trimester. But then in the second trimester, it lets lawmakers enact restrictions reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant mother, and in the third trimester, abortion is banned except to save the life and health of the mother. Why did the committee choose that language instead of using the fetal viability language?
Because Roe was a recognizable 50-year precedent, and we’re living in South Dakota. When you break it down, the only push back I’d have on that second trimester, as you described it, is that they can’t restrict, they can regulate, but they can’t prohibit an abortion in the second trimester. We’re talking about abortion that takes place in a hospital or a licensed medical facility by a licensed medical professional — those are the kinds of regulations that would be allowable, like they were under Roe. Essentially 99% of all abortions in this country occur in the first two trimesters. Right now we have 0% accessibility. We’re covering 99%, and then you get into the third trimester, which is pretty typical in most states. It’s the life or health of the mother.
Back in December, the regional Planned Parenthood and state American Civil Liberties Union opposed the scope of the measure. Those are organizations with big money who have backed a lot of the successful initiatives in Michigan and Ohio. Have they come around after seeing the success of the initiative so far?
Not yet. We are sincerely hoping that they will. I reached out very early in our process of trying to convene groups of stakeholders. And at the time, I think it was too early for them. We know, having done these initiatives, that we need to get started early out here, because we rely pretty heavily on the grassroots. That can be a mixed bag. Sometimes volunteers don’t want to circulate in sub-zero weather. We have tough winters out here, and we knew we needed every day possible, every day available to be able to gather signatures — especially for a constitutional amendment. But we reached out to Planned Parenthood and to the ACLU at the time. To be honest with you, I don’t think that they were particularly interested in South Dakota in a ballot measure approach. I think they were looking at other bigger states. We’ve extended olive branch after olive branch to these groups hoping that they’ll get engaged at some point.
I know there are people on the left that would like to go a lot further. Think about what happened after that trigger law went into effect. It just seems to make a lot of sense and to be able to say, hey, all we’re doing is restoring the rights that women had for 50 years. Read the language of Roe [side-by-side] with our ballot measure. The language is pretty much exact. If these national groups want to do something after we’re successful and expand it, have at it. But we’re concentrating on something that we think makes a lot of sense.
South Dakota GOP Rep. Jon Hansen sponsored legislation that allows citizens to withdraw petition signatures. The governor signed that into law in March, and Hansen is also the co-chair of the Life Defense Fund, which is opposing the abortion-rights ballot measure. How is Dakotans for Health preparing for any future attacks against the campaign as we near the election?
We just intercept it. They were apparently representing themselves as members of the secretary of state’s office. But a number of people complained about it and that’s why [Secretary of State] Monae Johnson requested [Attorney General Marty] Jackley investigate.
I have described their efforts as desperate. They were harassing us the whole time we were circulating. They would send protesters out to harass our circulators and to harass or intimidate voters that wanted to sign the petition. It has been an interesting journey. Ultimately, our mantra has been ‘let the voters decide.’ We’ve been qualified. We’re going to be on the ballot. We’re prepared for a lawsuit.
In May, you submitted some 55,000 signatures — that’s way over the 35,000 needed from registered voters to qualify. What memorable interactions have you had with South Dakotans in support of this? What has the response been from South Dakotans on the ground?
We’ve got a number of people from the medical community that are doctors who are just really troubled by the situation today. There’s a woman that’s running for Congress out here who came to one of our events last year. She wasn’t a candidate then, and I’ve known her for quite some time, but her daughter was miscarrying, went to one of the hospitals and was told to go home. Then her husband finds her passed out in the bathroom bleeding and had to call the ambulance to get her in. Of course then her life was on the line and they took care of the situation, but that’s not right.
We’re calling our effort a freedom amendment. Women who are raped don’t have the freedom they once had to make a decision. A victim of incest who becomes pregnant lost that ability, and women with dangerous problematic pregnancies have lost their freedom. We have a governor who likes to tell you to come to South Dakota: Live, work and play. It’s a free state. Well, it ain’t free if you’re a female.
Nancy Turbak Berry, a former state Democratic lawmaker and an abortion-rights advocate, will lead the Freedom Amendment Coalition to support the measure in the next phase. Was it a strategic choice to add a woman leader to the effort? Will you still be involved?
Oh, yeah, I’ll be intimately involved. We spent so much time this last year and a half focusing on getting signatures. We look at this as the next step of the campaign which is expanding beyond volunteers. The grassroots to building a nonpartisan, bipartisan coalition. We’ll be announcing Republicans for the Freedom Amendment, Libertarians for the Freedom Amendment, Independents for the Freedom Amendment.
Nancy is very articulate. I’ve known her for years. She’s been practicing attorney in Watertown, born and raised up there. I love her story. She was educated in an 11-room schoolhouse but ends up going to Harvard and does her undergrad and then bolts to university to get her law degree, came back, ran for the legislature later and served two terms in the [state] Senate. She’s going to bring a lot to the campaign.