Recently, opponents have sent out attack ads claiming that I was a sponsor of a bill to “stop the vaccination of school children.”

This is false. I believe immunizations and vaccines have stopped the spread of many dangerous illnesses in the world, and fully support the right of all parents to vaccinate their children and of schools to offer and encourage vaccination.

What is more troubling is the big-money, big-government opponents willing to distort the truth in order to ensure I don’t cause them more problems with their agenda in Pierre. 

The bill referenced by the attack would NOT stop the vaccination of school children, but it would have required school medical officials to obtain the consent of parents to conduct any immunizations on their children, and remove the ability of schools to threaten expulsion if parents did not consent to every single vaccine on the schedule.  

It never reached final form, and was killed in Committee before reaching the House floor for amendments and/or final passage.

No medical procedure is without risk, and parents should be fully informed and consenting to any treatment, foreign substance introduced into their child. 

Medical Providers operate under the principle of “Informed Consent.”  This means that you have a right to be presented with, understand, and agree with the benefits, risks, and side-effects when receiving any medical treatment. Our laws require informed consent in virtually every area of medical practice. The bill referenced would ensure that schools, when they act in the capacity as a medical provider of immunizations, comply with this widely accepted (and constitutionally protected) principle. 

The truth is that I took an oath to uphold the constitution. In  the 14th amendment it clearly guarantees “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens, and also recognizes “The right of the people to be secure in their persons…“

The South Dakota Constitution also states,  “it shall be the duty of the Legislature to establish and maintain a general and uniform system of public schools wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all;”

What has evolved over the years is an inconsistency between the U.S. & South Dakota Constitutions, accepted medical practice, parental rights, and school policies. The bill referenced (HB 1235) was a bill to attempt to bring these items into compliance. It was an important issue to raise, as we have a solemn duty as a legislature to balance competing interests and ensure our statewide practices are following constitutional and medical principles.

Current South Dakota law already allows Parents of school children to opt-out of immunizations, but they must be very vigilant to read every page of a large school handbook, they must voluntarily take action at the appropriate time, and they may only use “religious” grounds. There are other reasons, such as serious medical risks associated with certain vaccines, which are not sufficient grounds for opt-out today.

This forces a strange choice: The parents have a constitutional right to access an education that is “equally open to all,” and children (& their guardians) have a constitutional right not to be forced to undergo a medical treatment that carries a significant medical risk. Yet parents were threatened with disenrollment or expulsion of their students if they did not agree with the exact immunization schedule decided on by the school.

This does not create a culture of informed consent where parents are fully informed and consenting to medical care provided to their children. Instead, it allows school officials to use the threat of expulsion to force students to undergo treatments their parents do not agree with. 

The America I know and love was founded the principles of freedom and individual liberty. If parents, through the informed consent process, firmly believes based on research and family history that a specific vaccine or immunotherapy poses a greater than negligible risk to their child, it should be their right to avoid that treatment and still have their child access the education system they paid for that is guaranteed to be “equally open to all.”