Five Republican senators have joined with Democrats to oppose the bill in the South Carolina Senate, with GOP Sen. Tom Davis threatening filibuster if the measure, as written, comes up for a vote. Davis joined all three Republican women in the Senate, as well as a male GOP colleague, in fighting tight House limits. Davis and a female Republican senator, Penny Gustafson, voted for the compromise. South Carolina has already passed a onerous law banning abortions after six weeks, with exceptions up to 20 weeks in cases of rape or incest. Compromise legislation passed by the Senate reduces that time period to 12 weeks and requires police to collect DNA from an aborted fetus. It’s more restrictive than the so-called fetal heartbeat bill that the General Assembly passed last year, before the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned Roe v. Wade, but it avoids the blanket ban, without exceptions, that House Republicans he initially tried to pass. That ban remains in place while the South Carolina Supreme Court hears a right-to-privacy challenge to the law, and the state’s pre-Dobbs ban of 20 weeks is currently in effect, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Thursday’s defeat of South Carolina’s bill, as well as a series of legal challenges to similar restrictive measures in states like Idaho, North Dakota and Indiana, and ballot measures to protect abortion rights in Michigan and Kansas, speak volumes. about the practical difficulties in passing and enforcing the abortion ban. “We tend to think of the abortion ban as an on-off switch,” Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, told Vox. But in a post-Dobbs landscape, “the amount of legal complexity is going to intensify.” That’s coming, he said, as restrictions in states like Idaho and North Dakota have faced legal challenges and in legislatures as the dangers of severely restricting abortion access become clear.
South Carolina got a reality check on abortion restrictions
The South Carolina House of Representatives wrote the repealed bill banning post-fertilization abortions. although it passed there, and the 30-member Republican majority in the Senate had enough votes to pass it, they did not have an absolute majority. Senate Democrats took advantage of that vulnerability and allied with Davis, as well as Senators Katrina Seeley, Sandy Sen and Penri Gustafson — all women — and one other Republican. “Yes, I’m pro-life,” Shealy, who has previously voted in favor of abortion restrictions, said during Thursday’s special session. “I am also in favor of the life of the mother, the life she has with her children who have already been born. I care about kids being forced into adulthood, which was created by a legislature full of men, so they can take a victory lap and feel good about it.” Eventually, Republicans had to go back to the negotiating table and came away with a six-week ban and more onerous restrictions on abortion after rape and incest. The original bill, which passed the House, had exemptions for rape and incest, as well as the life and health of the mother, Rep. Neal Collins (R) told Vox. “The council […] passed a bill banning abortions after six weeks, with the same exceptions as well [exceptions for] fetal abnormalities, which is almost exactly the same bill we passed last year, we called it the fetal heartbeat bill.” Now, the bill will have to go back to the House, which can either agree to pass the Senate bill or not — at which point the General Assembly will have to form a committee of three Democrats and three Republicans from each chamber to try to come up with a compromise that suits both bodies. That could happen next week. The new bill limits exemptions for rape and incest to twelve weeks, a significant departure from the fetal heartbeat bill which allows exemptions up to 20 weeks. The new bill also requires two doctors to certify that fetal abnormalities are fatal and mandates that DNA from a rape and incest abortion go to law enforcement. “I guess it’s for evidence gathering in case they go after whoever rapes or commits incest,” Collins said. The special session brought into sharp relief what happens when the rhetoric of anti-choice politicians collides with real life — people’s real problems, needs and beliefs — after the Supreme Court struck down the legal safeguards of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto (D) told Vox. “[Anti-choice legislators] they could make whatever political points they wanted because they had a backstop,” he said. “They knew that none of what they went through would ever come true. They could pass whatever they wanted, and it didn’t matter — and it allowed them to let their rhetoric soar into the red meat of their party, because they could take the party knowing that nothing they said was ever going to happen to be enacted into law. Then, suddenly […] he’s like the dog that caught the bus.” South Carolina lawmakers now also understand that outright restrictions on abortion are unpopular with voters, Hutto said. National polls on the matter show the same. a Pew Research study released just before the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade shows that 61 percent of Americans support abortion in all or some cases. These numbers can be abstract when extrapolated to a legislative district. But lawmakers must now grapple with what those numbers mean in context. In a Facebook post dated Aug. 30, Collins wrote that he asked his more conservative constituents about abortion access. Of the 43 surveys returned, “The results clearly show that an overwhelming majority of even very conservative people want abortion exemptions,” he wrote. “Even the churchmen, the Southern Baptists, the conservative ladies” are generally not willing to impose their own beliefs about abortion on others, Hutto said, challenging the monolithic view of Southern voters and suggesting that abortion could be a major issue in the November midterms. — even in a conservative state like South Carolina. “The governor’s race in South Carolina is now competitive,” Hutto said. Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican who ascended to the office when Nikki Haley left to join the Trump administration, indicated he would sign a full abortion ban if he met his office. With that statement on the record, and abortion becoming an increasingly contentious issue for voters, Democrats have at least one chance to capture the governor’s mansion in November. “The choice is on the ballot,” Hutto said.
There are many levers of pressure against abortion restrictions
Among the many states with abortion bans on the books, only a few were actually able to go into full effect after the Dobbs decision. Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Missouri, Idaho, and Tennessee all have bans on nearly all abortions, with only some states offering exemptions in cases of serious health risks to the parent. Six-week bans have been enacted in Ohio, Kentucky and Georgia but are being challenged in court, as are Florida’s 15-week ban, Idaho, Louisiana and Kentucky laws and Wisconsin’s ban dating back to 1849, according to CNN. Lawsuits are an essential method of fighting these laws, or at least delaying them, even after Dobbs, Rebouché told Vox. “The overturning of Roe didn’t keep abortion out of the courts,” he said, adding that it was “a matter of time” before the bans put in place face some sort of challenge. This could look like state-level legislation protecting abortion, referendums to codify abortion rights in state constitutions, and lobbying by international human rights agencies and corporations, although none of these agencies have legislative or enforcement powers. power. “Some of our states are really extreme in the international order on abortion,” Rebouché said. “International rights organizations have forced countries to undertake this sort of thing” and “stigma and shame” can be very powerful motivators. But securing abortion rights right now depends on the interplay between voter turnout and the courts, a dynamic that recently emerged in Michigan. Voters will hold a referendum on their midterm ballots in November after the state Supreme Court struck down a state board of elections decision to leave the measure off the ballot because of typographical errors in petitions calling for the referendum, The New York Times reported Thursday . In August, Kansas voters soundly rejected a lawmaker’s attempt to insert language into the state constitution that would have expressly denied the right to an abortion, the Associated Press reported at the time. The Kansas Supreme Court in 2019 had upheld the right to an abortion under the state’s Bill of Rights. the August referendum ratified this decision. “Kansas was a shock to everybody’s systems,” David Cohen, a professor at Drexel University’s Thomas Kline School of Law and co-author with Rebouché of a paper on the post-Dobbs legal landscape called “The New Abortion Battleground’. “I don’t think anyone saw what happened next.” Michigan, however, “will give us a big look into the future,” in terms of how states might navigate abortion bans and legal…
