The sixth of seven children, I might never have been born if my mother’s doctor had done as she asked and given her a prescription for an IUD, the most reliable form of birth control available to women of her time, years before the Pill forever changed family planning. Dr. Byland, a staunch Roman Catholic, was fiercely opposed to birth control and felt morally justified in imposing his beliefs on his patients. My mother adored him and would never have questioned his advice. In the 1940s and 1950s, few women would have.

Mom and Dad viewed their family as complete long before she stopped having babies. Giving birth to Linda, the seventh of us who arrived not quite 10 years after the birth of the first of us, nearly claimed Mom’s life. Certainly it affected her health for the rest of it. She was hospitalized for months after my sister’s birth. Should Linda, or any of us, never have been born? No one is willing to concede that. “All of you were loved,” Mom once said, “but only one of you was planned.” Indeed, it seems beside the point to even ask the question: What if our lives had been prevented? It’s just an unimaginable place to be. Besides, whose to say that our little souls wouldn’t have attached themselves to some other set of DNA?     The point is, our mother was denied the right to decide how large her family should be. Dr. Byland played a conscientious objector card of sorts, imposing his religious convictions on her. He knew best. If she had died giving birth, as she nearly did, would he have questioned whether he’d upheld his oath to “do no harm,” or would he have determined her death to be “God’s will”?

No one can say for sure, only that such doubt results when the people most directly affected by a pregnancy – the women themselves – are denied freedom of choice over when or if they will have children.

Dr. Byland wasn’t some relic from the past who mixed religion and the practice of medicine and went the way of the dinosaur, though he might have been not so many years ago. Today, when pharmacists around the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives, the so-called “morning-after pill,” he would be seen as something of a hero for not sending women who want reproductive freedom their way in the first place. And, in South Dakota, whose Legislature passed and governor signed the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion – indeed, anti-woman – legislation since Roe vs. Wade, he might have been viewed as a candidate for sainthood.

Certainly Dr. Byland’s position was less morally ambivalent than the South Dakota Legislature’s. Based on the religious premise that life is precious, it prohibits physicians from prescribing the morning-after pill “with the specific intent” of terminating a pregnancy. At the same time, it panders to those Americans who in general oppose abortion, but would support it in cases of rape or incest or if the mother’s survival or the life of her unborn child were at risk.

South Dakota’s law is the kind of bad stew that results when religion, politics and medicine are stirred together in an attempt to please everyone, but in the end may be too bitter for even the newly conservative U.S. Supreme Court to swallow.