Former legislator establishes Republican group to support abortion-rights amendment

People sign a petition to put a measure on the ballot in 2024 that would reinstate abortion rights in South Dakota. (Courtesy: Dakotans for Health)

Casey Murschel, a Republican former legislator and former Sioux Falls city councilor, will lead a new group of Republicans supporting an abortion-rights ballot question, she said Tuesday.

Murschel said the group, Republicans for Freedom Amendment G, does not have a roster of members yet and has some members who are not yet “public.”

Abortions are currently banned in South Dakota, except to “preserve the life of the pregnant female.” The ballot measure would legalize abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy but allow the state to impose limited regulations in the second trimester and a ban in the third trimester, with exceptions for the life and health of the mother.

Voters will consider the measure Nov. 5, pending litigation from an anti-abortion group seeking to disqualify the measure from the ballot.

Murschel served three terms in the state House of Representatives in the early 2000s. She said the new group is a platform for Republicans who support reproductive rights to “know they’re not alone.”

Murschel voted against the state’s 2005 abortion trigger ban as a legislator (the ban went into effect in 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned) and advocated against bans that voters rejected in 2006 and 2008.

“What happened in the Legislature was very strange,” Murschel recalled of the 2005 session, “because there’d been pro-choice Republicans forever: nationally and locally. What was interesting was the pressure in the Legislature that Republicans got from Right to Life groups at the time.”

Over one-third of the South Dakota voters who signed the petition to put the abortion-rights measure on the ballot were registered Republicans, said Nancy Turbak Berry, chair of the Freedom Amendment Coalition. The coalition is affiliated with Dakotans for Health, which gathered the petition signatures.

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A 2024 South Dakota News Watch and Chiesman Center for Democracy survey reported 53% of respondents support the abortion-rights constitutional amendment.

Murschel is currently a registered Republican, though she left her party shortly after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and registered as an independent , according to an Associated Press news story from 2022. She told South Dakota Searchlight she retained traditional Republican values, including small government and individual liberty, and re-registered as a Republican this year so she could vote in the party’s primary election.

“The hard-core, anti-abortion wing of our party has captured the state Legislature and decreed that the freedom to choose abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy must be taken away. But that is not Republicanism. That is zealotry,” Murschel said in a statement.

The South Dakota Republican Party unanimously opposed the abortion-rights amendment at its convention this summer and urged South Dakotans to oppose it, according to the Life Defense Fund, a ballot question committee opposed to the measure. The committee’s leaders, Leslee Unruh and state Rep. Jon Hansen, said in an emailed statement that Murschel “might be registered ‘Republican'” but is “ as much of a far-left liberal as it gets.”

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The post Former legislator establishes Republican group to support abortion-rights amendment appeared first on South Dakota Searchlight .