PIERRE - The South Dakota House and Senate passed similar bills Tuesday requiring doctors to offer pregnant women the chance to see sonograms before they decide to get abortions.

If a woman didn't want to see the sonogram, she would have to sign a statement that the offer had been made.

The Senate version of the bill passed 21 to 13. A slightly different House version passed 38 to 31 later Tuesday afternoon.

Sen. Dennis Schmidt, R-Rapid City, who sponsored the Senate bill, SB88, argued the sonogram requirement would simply improve "informed consent" for women.

Schmidt said sonograms are performed for a variety of procedures, not just abortions, and he said patients are routinely invited to watch. "I watched the procedure done on my wife for hip surgery and I thought, 'This is phenomenal,'" he said. "This was great information."

On the House side, Rep. Deb Peters, R-Hartford, who voted against the House version, HB1193, offered a different medical perspective.

"With my first child, I was told that my child was going to be born without a head, that the … spinal cord was going to be outside the vertebra in the back," she said.

Peters said she had to undergo many tests.

"I had to do numerous things, and in that situation, you're faced with a life-and-death decision. It's not a decision that's taken lightly."

Peters, who opposes abortion, voted against the sonogram bill. "It's not doing what you think it's doing," she said. "You're going to be torturing women like me who have to make a life-and-death decision, and it's not fair."

(Peters later said she had the baby, who turned out to be a normal, healthy child.)

Sen. Tom Katus, D-Rapid City, spoke against the Senate version of the bill.

"This is a tough, tough decision," he said. Katus and other lawmakers in both chambers argued that requiring the offer to view a sonogram would interfere with doctor-patient relationships.

Sen. Sandy Jerstad, D-Sioux Falls, called the sonogram requirement "harassment" of women. "Why would we as legislators think that we know better than doctors?" she asked.

Schmidt, however, said doctors who perform abortions often do not establish relationships with patients. "They really don't have contact until the girl is on the table," he said.

Rep. Don Van Etten, R-Rapid City, a retired physician, agreed with Schmidt, and he voted for the bill. He said doctors performing abortions at the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Sioux Falls were from out of state and did not know their patients. "That doctor-patient relationship is considerably warped," he said.

Rep. Roger Hunt, R-Brandon, another advocate for the bill, said Planned Parenthood already required signatures on an informed-consent document, and he said adding a line for sonograms would not be difficult.

Hunt also agreed that the intended effect of the bill was to reduce abortions. "We fully recognize that when a woman sees a sonogram, there is a high percentage of women who say, 'Wait. I was told this was just a glob of tissue.'" Many of those women decide not to have the abortion, he said.

After the vote, Kate Looby, director of Planned Parenthood in South Dakota, said lawmakers were focusing on the wrong problem. "These bills won't prevent even one unintended pregnancy and won't do anything to reduce the need for abortion," she said. "It's another example of Roger Hunt and a small group of legislators fixated on intruding into the personal, private matters of South Dakotans rather than providing authentic solutions."

Now, both bills go back to committees.

The Senate version requires doctors to report the numbers of women who get offers to view sonograms, the number who of those who go on to get abortions and the number who decide not to have an abortion.

The simpler House bill simply requires records to be kept and for women to acknowledge they received the offer.

The House and Senate will have to agree on one version or on a compromise.

The passage of the two bills comes after the Senate Health and Human Services Committee had killed SB88 twice. That included a 6-0 vote Monday for a "do not pass" recommendation, but supporters forced a floor vote.

The House Health and Human Services Committee had passed HB1193.

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com