South Carolina House Bill 5399, which passed the state House last month, had enough support from Senate Republicans to ban nearly all abortions in the state, but a filibuster Thursday by state Sen. Republican Tom Davis blocked it. Republicans lacked the votes to overcome a filibuster and move to a vote on the bill, which requires a higher vote threshold.
“I’m not going to let this (bill) come to a vote unless this chamber votes and seats me,” Davis said on the Senate floor Thursday night.
In introducing the amendment, state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, a Republican, admitted that “there are no votes in the Senate right now to ban abortion before six weeks.”
“I hate to admit it,” he said, adding, “You have to have the votes to pass it, and unfortunately we don’t.”
“That’s not where I wanted to be. I was hoping we would do something pretty aggressive in response to Dobbs,” Massey said in introducing his amendment. “Hopefully we will make progress. This amendment is certainly progress.”
He argued that the amendment would “fortify” South Carolina’s law, S.1, against legal challenges and fix issues the state Supreme Court identified as vague with the law. He argued that if the law isn’t fixed, South Carolina will become “abortion on demand.”
S. 1 prohibits abortions once what it calls a “fetal heartbeat” is detected, which can be as early as four weeks, and more commonly, six weeks into pregnancy.
Massey’s amendment maintains exceptions to the ban for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, but shortens the time frame. The law currently allows exceptions to the ban for rape or incest if the “probable age of the fetus after fertilization” is less than 20 weeks. The amendment would allow an exemption for rape or incest up until the first trimester, which lasts until about 14 weeks.
Several senators on the floor Thursday took issue with two subsections of the amendment, which state that fatal fetal abnormalities would require a diagnosis by two separate doctors before an abortion can be performed and that the doctor performing the abortion “must retain a DNA sample from the fetus that remains and notify the sheriff of the county in which the abortion occurred.” A sheriff must then retrieve and store the sample as evidence for 90 days so that the rapist can be prosecuted.
Massey’s amendment was carried by voice vote.
The bill has been sent back to the South Carolina House of Representatives, which will decide whether to accept the changes.
Republicans were divided
House Bill 5399, when first introduced in the Senate on Wednesday, did not include exemptions for rape or incest or fatal fetal abnormalities. Davis had introduced several amendments over the course of two days to add back the exemptions, and managed to get an exemption for fatal fetal abnormalities back into the bill.
“I made some progress yesterday to improve a bad bill, but it’s nowhere near where I can support it,” Davis said Thursday.
“And I recognize to a significant extent that I have a rift with my Republican brethren,” he added.
House Republicans were deeply divided over whether the bill should include those exemptions — with the three female members of the Senate GOP speaking out strongly against the bill Wednesday morning.
“If you want to believe that God wants you to pass a bill without exception that kills mothers and ruins the lives of children, let mothers bring babies home to bury them, then I think you are not communicating properly with God or maybe with you. “I just don’t communicate with him at all,” Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy said Wednesday in a fiery speech on the Senate floor to her male colleagues.
“I know we disagree on a lot of things, but listening to you talk about menstrual cycles, conception, how you know when your egg is fertilized or you’re having a baby, I have to tell you that it really disgusts me.”
Shealy added: “Yes, I’m pro-life. I’m also pro-life for the mother, the life she has with her children who are already born. I care about children being forced into adulthood by a legislature full of men , so they can take a victory lap and feel good about it. You want kids who are raising kids who will probably experience domestic violence and live in poverty. But you don’t care because you did your job and you’ll forget about them once they’re born.”
Fellow GOP Sen. Sandy Senn also predicted that women would flock to the November election to vote on the abortion issue, while also calling for the issue to be on the ballot.
Republican Sen. Penry Gustafson called on lawmakers to “face reality. We’re not living in the dark ages.”
“This is not just a moral decision. And I don’t support abortion on demand and I don’t support abortion as birth control, but there are more considerations that need to be made,” he told the Senate. for exemptions for fatal fetal abnormalities.
Lawmakers on Thursday also declined to amend H. 5399, so its text would be replaced with a joint resolution that would have proposed a ballot measure that would amend the constitution to recognize a “right to bodily integrity and autonomy that includes a limited right to abortion ».
Conservative Republican Rep. Josiah Magnuson, who sponsored the bill, told CNN it was “shameful” that the Senate failed to pass the abortion ban because “most of these Republicans ran on strong pro-life platforms.”
“We need to pass a bill that truly protects every innocent life,” he argued. He said conservative Republicans would be willing to agree to what lawmakers can do to restrict abortion, but added, “I don’t think that’s the best we can get.” Magnuson said he supports a vote against the Senate changes to the bill, which if the House chooses to do so will send the legislation to a conference committee.
After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, an ad hoc committee of the South Carolina House met in July to draft a “working draft” of H. 5399.
The original bill, as drafted, sought to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest — which, as in the Senate, was a major point of contention among House Republicans.
Exceptions were limited to preventing the death of the pregnant woman, substantial risk of death to the pregnant woman due to a physical condition, or “substantial physical impairment of an important bodily function of the pregnant woman.” The bill listed several medical conditions it considered to pose such a risk to the pregnant woman, including molecular pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, severe preeclampsia and a miscarriage.
The House last week hastily added an exception for cases of rape and incest up to 12 weeks after arrest, with requirements to report the claim of rape or incest to law enforcement, before voting on the bill.
The Senate Medical Affairs Committee on Tuesday removed the exemption for rape and incest up to 12 weeks after an arrest, before advancing it to the full Senate.
The Senate-amended bill will now have to be re-approved by the House before it is sent to the governor’s office.
“This modified version does not advance the cause of life [South Carolina] and I cannot agree to a bill that does nothing,” the chairman of the ad hoc House committee, Republican Rep. John McCravey, told CNN in an email. to rewrite our state laws after Dobbs.”
CNN’s Dianne Gallagher contributed to this report.
