A Montana-based abortion rights group is reaching out to neighboring states announcing abortion and contraception are legal and available there.

South Dakota has a near total abortion ban, which extends to pregnancies caused by rape or incest. Health care professionals say the state’s current abortion exception is unclear.

“Minnesota and Colorado are being so inundated with volume from other states that they might have wait times,” said Nicole Smith, executive director of Montanans for Choice.

Smith said the number of South Dakota women travelling to Montana is quite small. That’s why the group is raising awareness that the state is an option to procure the procedure, which includes a billboard campaign that welcomes those seeking the procedure.

 “In Montana, we can see people same day that they get here, pretty much,” Smith said. “We just want folks to know that we do have a lot of availability and if they don’t want to wait and they can get into Montana—we can probably see them pretty quickly.”

Since September last year, 280 South Dakotans travelled to Minnesota for an abortion and 170 travelled to Colorado for the procedure. That’s according to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health group.

The closest abortion facilities to South Dakota in Montana are located in Billings. Smith says clinics also offer abortion medication through telemedicine.

Smith said Montana’s constitution has strong health care privacy rights.

“We have almost unfettered access to abortion in Montana,” Smith added. “There’s no mandatory waiting periods. There’s no mandatory counselling. We have telehealth for medication abortion. We’re very grateful that our constitution has protected those rights—that doctors and providers are able to give best practice medicine to us without politicians interfering in that way.”

South Dakota voters are set to vote on whether to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution this November. Constitutional Amendment G grants South Dakota women access to abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy. It allows the state to restrict the procedure in the third trimester, with exceptions for health and life of the mother.

Planned Parenthood North Central States believe the measure will not “adequately reinstate” abortion access in the state. Abortion opponents call the measure extreme.

A great recent article by Chris D’Angelo reports on the connection between Tim Sheehy, the Republican challenging Jon Tester for his senate seat, and PERC, the Bozeman-based Property and Environment Research Center that promotes what it calls “free market environmentalism.”  

While Montanans might wonder about Sheehy’s background and policy positions given the shifting sands in his explanations, the fact that he was on the board of PERC is not in question — despite his failure to disclose that fact as required by Senate rules which his campaign says is an “omission” that’s being “amended.”   

For those who have long been in the conservation, environmental, and public lands policy arena, PERC is a very well-known entity. As noted on its IRS 990 non-profit reporting form, the center is “dedicated to advancing conservation through markets, incentives, property rights and partnerships” which “applies economic thinking to environmental problems.” 

But to put it somewhat more simply, PERC believes that private land ownership results in better conservation of those lands under the theory — and it is a disputable theory — that if you own the land and resources, you take better care of it due to its investment value.  This has long been their across the board approach to land, water, endangered species and resource extraction.

If one wanted to dispute that theory, it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to do, particularly in Montana where checking the list of Superfund sites left behind by private industries and owners bears indisputable evidence of the myth that private ownership means better conservation of those resources.

In fact, the theory falls on its face since, when “using economic thinking” the all-too-often result is to exploit the resources to maximize profit as quickly as possible.  And again, this example is applicable across a wide spectrum of resources.  In Montana, that can mean anything from degrading rangeland by putting more livestock on it than it can sustain to, as in Plum Creek’s sad history, leaving behind stumpfields filled with noxious weeds on their vast private — once public — land holdings. 

None of this is particularly a mystery, yet PERC has sucked down enormous amounts of funding from anti-conservation sources for more than four decades as it tries mightily to put lipstick on the pig of the all-too-obvious results of runaway private lands resource extraction.

Running one of the most high-stakes senate campaigns in the nation, however, produces a lot of tap-dancing around the truth in an effort to convince voters that you’re for whatever position will garner the most votes come Election Day. 

In that regard, both Sheehy and PERC are scuttling sideways in their positions.  Given the overwhelming support for “keeping public lands in public hands” in Montana, PERC now claims it “firmly believes that public lands should stay in public hands. We do not advocate for nor support privatization or divestiture.”  

Funny that, given its previous and very long-held position that private ownership of lands and waters is the key to conservation.  Likewise, Sheehy’s position, “that “public lands must stay in public hands” is completely the opposite from the one he held only a year ago, and parrots PERC not only in its verbiage, but in its realization of which way public sentiment and the electoral winds are blowing.

Since what’s at stake is nothing less than the future of public lands in the Big Sky State, it behooves us to demand specific policy positions in writing from all candidates for public office — including the race for Montana’s Senate seat.  

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS — A couple from Missouri have a goal to walk through every state in the lower 48.

Paige and Torin – known by their social media handle “Walking America Couple” – are in leg three of a five-leg, cross-country journey.

They’ve already traversed through 21 states, and on Thursday, their journey brought them to just outside White Sulphur Springs.

“Even out here in the more rural open space, we still make a lot of friends on the side of the road. People often stop and ask what we’re doing, or stop to see if we need water or food,” says Paige.

Each leg takes the couple roughly six months to one year, though they take short breaks in-between. They’re also completing the entire journey with their dog Jak.

“I think he loves the adventure more than we do,” Paige adds.

Through rain, shine, snow, and severe weather warnings, the couple have not been deterred, their purpose and mission propelling them.

“We would like to set the example that you can find contentment under almost any circumstance,” says Torin. “I started out the journey an incredibly cynical person, and it was through these repeated interactions of kindness with people that I had otherwise written off in the past, that my perspective began to change dramatically,” he adds.

Now, their journey is helping to spread the same happiness they’ve discovered to those they encounter on their journeys.

“We hope to be the example that we’re, as humans, all more malleable than we think,” says Paige.

For more information, click here to visit their website.