Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | South Dakota ‘bans’ abortion by Robert Booth, et. al.

Republican senator Bill Napoli said on the US TV channel PBS that most abortions were being carried out for “convenience”. He insisted, however, that exceptions could be made for rape or incest under a provision that protects the mother’s life.

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged,” he said. “The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalised and raped, sodomised as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

Of course, we’ll need a Council of the Righteous to certify those virgins. And we’ll need a way to tell the virgins apart from the “spoiled” (whom it is OK to rape brutally). How about veils for the virgins and scarlet letters for the whores? mjh

Meanwhile, laws restricting abortions have been passed in El Salvador, Hungary, Poland and the Russian Federation, as well as the US.

In Poland the conservative Law and Justice party took power last October, and women’s rights groups now fear the country’s already restrictive abortion laws could be tightened further to deny abortions to rape victims and women with deformed foetuses (although Law and Justice has proposed no such measures).

At the European parliament, in Strasbourg, in November the League of Polish Families, an ultra-Catholic party, ran a controversial exhibition comparing abortion to Nazi death camps.

And in Mexico, where abortion law has been relaxed since 1995, Felipe Calderon, the presidential candidate for the incumbent National Action party, has cited scripture in stump speeches and trumpeted an anti-abortion party line – positions that proved critical in winning a three-way race for the party nomination.