Sen. Mike Rounds says abortion bans should be decided by states, not by Congress

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South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said abortion rights should be left up to the states to decide, disagreeing with one of his Republican colleagues in Congress.

Rounds said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper that states should decided the laws surrounding abortion, like South Dakota did in 2006 when Rounds signed a near-total abortion ban law, which was later voted down by voters. Voters later did the same again in 2008.

The senator had been asked this weekend by Tapper if he supported Sen. Lindsey Graham's (R-SC) nationwide abortion ban bill.

The Supreme Court ruled in mid-June that the right to abortion was not protected by the Constitution, overturning 50 years of that protection afforded by Roe v. Wade, and giving states the power to legislate abortion instead.

In South Dakota, that decision meant a 2005 trigger law went into full effect, banning all abortions even in the case of rape and incest.

"I think the individual states will come up with a whole a lot of different ideas about how to appropriately discuss abortion in general and then I think there will be a consensus over a period of years," Rounds said. "But at this point to have Congress step back in and tell all the states we know better than them is probably not the best direction to go."

Rounds added a group of lawmakers had looked at a 20-week abortion ban, but found it did not have popular support in both houses of Congress.

Graham's bill, which was introduced Tuesday, would ban the procedure after 15 weeks across the county, according to USA Today.

South Dakota's other senator, John Thune, the second-highest ranking Republican, also signaled that abortion rights should be determined by the state.

"A lot of our members believe that these are going to be issues that are debated at the state level," Thune told The Hill on Wednesday. "Individual states are going to come to a political consensus. At some point maybe there starts to become a national consensus around a sense of restrictions."

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This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Sen. Mike Rounds tells CNN that abortion bans should be decided by states