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The article examines the 2006 struggle over abortion rights in South Dakota in order to consider the circulation of narratives on two distinct, but intersecting scales: first, the use of women's individual narratives as a rights-gaining strategy; and second, the narratives that reproductive justice scholars and activists have constructed about these movements. The article argues that the case of the South Dakota abortion wars encourages a rethinking of feminist assumptions regarding the political utility of personal narratives, and that the engagement of Native women in this case suggests the need for more complex understandings of the relationship of reproductive justice to reproductive rights frameworks. Scholars often produce these positions as fundamentally different, but, in practice, they often overlap in ways that suggest their deep intertwinement. This analysis adds to critical scholarship on reproduction not only in its focus on aspects of a case that have largely escaped attention, but, more importantly, in its insistence that broader social frames can be understood through a rethinking of the political utility of both personal and movement narratives.
Keywords: abortion / narratives / Native women / reproductive justice / reproductive rights / South Dakota
In 2006, the South Dakota state legislature passed "The Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act." Signed into law by Governor Mike Rounds, this draconian ban on abortion made no exceptions for rape, incest, or health of the woman.1 In fact, even if the life of the pregnant woman was in danger, according to this new law, physicians would be required to do everything possible to preserve the fetus. Abortion had already become increasingly inaccessible across the country (due, for example, to a lack of abortion providers, the refusal of many states to cover abortions through Medicaid and other state-based health care for low-income women, and the proliferation of restrictive laws, such as the twenty-four-hour waiting period and parental consent). And yet, South Dakota's abortion ban still shook the country-as much for its harshness as its overt challenge to the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. Had voters accepted the ban, in all likelihood the case would have eventually traveled to the Supreme Court, creating an opportunity to revisit Roe. South Dakota simultaneously came to symbolize the greatest hopes of the anti-abortion movement...