Cartoon by Scott L. Ehrisman, SouthDaCola.com
Once again, South Dakota has an abortion ban on the ballot in November. The '06 version allowed no exceptions even to save the life of the mother and would've prevented Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 from getting an abortion - it failed 56% to 44%.
The new one has exceptions for rape and incest victims who report the crime to police, or in cases where the woman is "at serious risk of a substantial and irreversible impairment of the functioning of a major bodily organ or system." If a ban that didn't even have these paltry loopholes can lose by such a narrow margin, it's going to take a lot more than us ripping off The Kinks to help stop this one, especially with a complete lack of a national movement against this initiative.
If you have second, go help fight this by signing the petition and donating at South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, a bipartisan group that is fighting the ballot measure, and enjoy our song "When Dakota Goes South" by clicking the play button below:
When Dakota Goes South
She drives around in her Winnebago
From the Black Hills down to the River Sioux
Like a time machine wrapped inside a tornado
That will blow us back to 1972
What to do? I hope you figure it out, yeah I do
When Dakota goes south and takes the whole world with her
I will open my mouth and tell her to stay right where she is
When Dakota goes south I'll try my best to forgive her
Until she figures it out, that it's not for her to insist
She'll kick the other girls in the stomach
And wait with tapping toes as they bleed
For the man in the robe to kick in the bucket
And she'll come jumping out of the weeds
With sunflower seeds, she knows not what she needs
When Dakota goes south and takes the whole world with her
I will open my mouth and tell her to stay where she belongs
When Dakota goes south I'll try my best to forgive her
Until she figures it out, that she's got this thing all wrong
Max and the Marginalized are a band and a blog. They do a song every week on the Huffington Post, all of which are available for download here. Add them on Facebook.