March 10, 2006

The news that South Dakota has banned all abortions brings out the explorer in me. I get excited the way anthropologists did recently when they found what may be the last undiscovered primitive people, in the Andaman Islands I think it was. It is with both glee and guilt that I reveal – or is the correct word "exploit" or "milk" – the odd customs and mad tribal leaders of South Dakota, a place little known even to fellow Americans. "Do people live there?" Garrison Keillor, the American humorist, was asked by a foreigner as they flew over the place this week. "They try," Keillor answered.

The bill, signed by the governor two days before International Women's Day, not that he'd notice, would only allow an abortion for a woman who was flat out dying. If you're an 11-year-old pregnant by your father in Spinks County, you're out of luck. Republican Senator Bill Napoli, high-school graduate and sponsor of the bill, went into some kind of pornographic fugue state when asked whether there shouldn't even be a teeny tiny exception. Okay, he said. "A rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She was planning on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated…"

At this point, reporters were edging away.

South Dakota is quite something. It doesn't reproduce well, having only 750,000 citizens (in two time zones, but with the same area code) and since no one in their right mind moves there, the new law may be a eugenics thing. Even the governor, Mike Rounds, an insurance salesman from a family of 11, has only four children with his wife Jean, despite their enthusiastic Catholicism. Jean met Mike at South Dakota State University in Brookings (Motto: "You can Go Anywhere from Here"). Gov. Rounds has said his next move is let pharmacists refuse to sell contraceptives, so take that, Jean. He has also set up scholarships for students who promise not to leave South Dakota after graduating.

South Dakota's state motto is "Under God the People Rule," its state slogan "Great Faces Great Places." You should hear the state song of the same name. The state bird is the Chinese ring-necked pheasant, which the state website pronounces "delicious."

One step up from State (where First Lady Jean earned a degree in secretarial science) is the University of South Dakota, which a Kaplan's/Newsweek special issue on education officially rated as "Interesting." It offers a degree in alcohol & drug abuse studies, apparently not realizing that most students obtain this degree informally.

Here's the problem: There isn't anything about South Dakota that isn't slightly … off-kilter. Oh, they try. For instance, you can take a virtual tour of the governor's mansion. Built in 2005, it's a cheaply built monster home with La-Z-Boys for eight. It looks like a small, one-family Hyatt Regency. What sane person would take this tour besides me?

Before this, Planned Parenthood had to fly in a woman doctor once a month to perform abortions. One of her patients agreed to be interviewed on film but only with her face hidden and her voice disguised, such was her fear of reprisals. Usually only Mafia snitches demand this level of secrecy. See what I mean about strange?

South Dakota tries desperately to attract people and then passes laws that repel them. That law terrifies women, not to mention men who don't want to have children with every woman they have sex with, or parents who would want to comfort, rather than torture, their raped daughter.

The worse women are treated, the less they feel able to have children who need protection. Rich countries such as Germany and Japan are fretting over their falling birth rate. Too late, they realize it's built into the system. For individual German and Japanese women see the drawbacks of motherhood as it is currently designed for working women in their particular nations and they say the hell with it. But in South Dakota, pregnant women are kept under guard.

If I were pregnant and earning working-class wages in Canada, Sgt. Harper's decision to destroy national daycare in its infancy might well make me decide to have an abortion. You can't be a single mother and prosper; it isn't possible here.

I greatly enjoy mocking the red states as they eagerly damage their own interests by increasing the misery quotient for women. South Dakota is a vital part of what the New York author Jonathan Franzen calls the "strategic national reserve of cluelessness."

But of course it's only funny because I'm not there and never will be. It's not funny ha-ha, it's funny-evil, like serial killer John Wayne Gacy in his clown costume.

What vast realms of cruelty lie in the blank American Midwest, not a heartland but a land of heartlessness. You look out the window of the plane in shock and awe.