The South Dakota abortion case

Emily Bazelon writes here, at Slate, about South Dakota's "unbelievable" abortion law which, among other things, "requires doctors to give patients who come for an abortion a written statement telling them that 'the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.'"  "If you care about doctors' freedom of speech," she writes, "or their responsibility to give accurate information to patients, the South Dakota statute looks pretty alarming."

I'm not sure what to think about the free-speech objection.  It seems to me that all kinds of reasonable, easily justifiable regulations of the practice of medicine are going to involve requiring doctors to communicate some information to patients and forbid them to say some things to patients.  The free-speech objection, then, appears to piggy-back on the "accurate information" objection.  So, is it, or is it not, the case that an abortion "terminate[s] the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"?  Well, the statute in question defines "human being" as "an individual living member of the species Homo sapiens, including the unborn human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages from fertilization to full gestation."  Bazelon thinks this is just cheating; is she right?

Here's the key paragraph of her piece:

But what's more distressing, because the majority's reasoning is so strained, is the assertion that by defining a phrase one way, a state can erase its ambiguity and the variety of perceptions people bring to it. It's one thing to say—as the case law the majority relies on here does—that a statutory definition binds judges and their interpretation of language. It's another entirely to say that when doctors tell women they are carrying a human being, that women will think, Oh, right, that means only the long, convoluted thing that the state says it does. Most patients won't think that, because they won't necessarily define "human being" the way the statute does. As Yale law professor Robert Post says in a 2007 article (PDF) in the University of Illinois Law Review, "If South Dakota were to enact a statute requiring physicians to inform abortion patients that they were destroying the 'soul' of their unborn progeny, and if it were explicitly to provide in the statute that 'soul' is defined as 'human DNA,' the evasion would be obvious." Instead, South Dakota has co-opted human being and attached its own meaning to it.

I was intrigued by the use of the word "co-opted."  Did the legislature really "attach it's own meaning" -- some kind of strange, esoteric, secret-knowledge meaning?  It strikes me that the objections to the statute reflect a worry that, by requiring doctors to remind women contemplating abortions that unborn children are "human beings", the law might make complicate the decision to end these human beings' lives.