Embryo

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Citing what they see as a more receptive or antiabortion high court, lawmakers easily approved a sweeping ban on the procedure, one that declares that life begins at conception.

South Dakota's law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion unless the mother's life is endangered. There are no exceptions for cases in which a mother's health may be threatened or cases in which the pregnancy results from rape or incest.

On the March 3, 2006, broadcast of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer we saw past the benign rhetoric about how the Supreme Court is going to stay impartial and the new Justices are not coming to the Supreme Court to grind an ax.

South Dakota has passed legislation that discriminates in favor of an embryo over the rights of a woman to control her own body.

Reproductive technology marches on. It is possible to place a fertilized egg of one woman into the womb of another woman. This is not surrogacy where the man impregnates another woman. This is the transfer of a fertilized egg of one women into that of another.

Currently, there are Third World women, and women of poverty in this nation, who are hiring out their wombs to people of means (often of different ethnicity) so that the hiring couple can have a baby that is biologically "theirs." The egg and sperm of the hiring couple are joined, and the embryo is implanted into another woman who has agreed to carry the fetus through labor. If a woman who has donated her womb has a change of heart, under South Dakota law she cannot get out of the services she has contracted to fulfill - nor does she (or so it seems) have any real legal standing once she delivers the baby.

This is not science fiction. This is the state of affairs today, and we are going down the slippery slope where the state begins to assert eminent domain over the womb.

Stay tuned. This is going to get a whole lot worse before we get away from people who are more interested in the rights of an embryo than a woman.