South Carolina Abortion Vote Exposes Fissures in the GOP Over Just How Extreme to Get

On Thursday, the state Senate passed more restrictions on abortion, though stopped short of a near-total ban. The result, as one abortion-rights advocate put it, was a “six-week ban with a bit more cruelty on top.”
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Protesters show their support for legal abortion at the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia on May 2, 2022. By Joshua Boucher/The State/Tribune News Service/Getty Images.

In the first day of debate this week over a bill that will ban nearly all abortions in South Carolina, state Senator Sandy Senn made a last-ditch political plea to her colleagues. “Let’s put this whole issue on the ballot,” she said. But standing behind a wooden lectern in the South Carolina statehouse, Senn, a Republican, admitted she knew she was fighting a lost cause. “We won't do that because y'all are scared to do that. The same thing that happened in Kansas would happen here, resoundingly. Y'all think you know better than your own constituents,” she said, referring to Kansans resoundingly rejecting a ballot measure that would have allowed lawmakers to curtail abortion access in the state.

For days, a dispute raged among the state’s Republicans, not over the passage of an abortion ban itself but over the severity of one, specifically, whether there should be exceptions for victims of rape and incest. After two long days of fierce debate on the floor, the chamber—in a vote of 27 to 16—passed more-restrictive abortion measures, though stopped short of a near-total ban. “It was an awful waste of taxpayer money and an awful waste of people’s time,” Vicki Ringer, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic in South Carolina, said Friday morning.

South Carolina has become a microcosm of the chaos unfurling nationally as women’s reproductive rights have spiraled into a state of legal crisis. Patients and doctors are being forced to wade through a confusing web of state laws—at times conflicting—and pending court cases. South Carolina has a six-week abortion ban on the books, signed into law in February 2021 by Republican Governor Henry McMaster. But the South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocked the ban, ruling that it conflicted with a 1974 law that effectively enshrined the protections of Roe v. Wade. The case remains unsettled. In place is an existing South Carolina law allowing abortions up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. The confusion has lead to risk-averse physicians fearing potential prosecution, in some cases to the detriment of their patients, and individuals seeking abortion unsure of what their rights actually are as the political and legal ground continues to shift beneath them.

The amended ban passed by the Senate on Thursday night mirrors the existing six-week ban. It also bans abortion after six-weeks of pregnancy, but it narrows the window in which there are exceptions for rape and incest from 20 weeks to 12 weeks. It also requires doctors to report abortions performed under these exceptions and take a DNA sample from the fetus, which then has to be transferred to the police and kept as evidence. Additionally, the bill allows for abortions in instances of fetal anomalies, but they must be confirmed by two doctors.

“I think what we've seen was that senators realized that there is no popular abortion ban bill, that it is unpopular with their citizens and they could not get to a point where they could ban abortions,” Ringer said. “What they got to last night was essentially back to the six-week ban but tightened the restrictions on rape and incest victims. So the six-week ban with a bit more cruelty on top, just for good measure.” 

The debate exposed fissures within the Republican Party. There are lawmakers like Doug Gilliam, who, presented with a hypothetical scenario by his Republican colleague Gil Gatch in which a minor was raped by her father, Gilliam, during the state House debate on the bill, dismissed the characterization that the child was “forced” to carry a pregnancy. “She had choices,” he said, posing Plan B as an alternative. State Senator Tom Davis pushed an amendment on the floor Wednesday that would allow for exceptions "if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, and the probable post-fertilization age of the fetus is fewer than 20 weeks"—which is greater than the 12-week window in the House bill.

The fracture among Republicans can be traced back to a dull, bare conference room on Tuesday, where the South Carolina Senate Medical Affairs Committee—a panel largely made up of white menvoted to strip the exceptions for rape and incest included in a bill that passed the House last week. The bill does include a narrow carve out if the life of the mother is at risk, though similar laws in other states have left women in life-threatening situations as physicians and hospitals to try to legally reconcile anti-abortion laws with their Hippocratic oath.

“We are literally transferring the penalty and criminal liability of the rapist’s crime to the baby,” state Senator Richard Cash, the Republican who introduced the amendment to remove exemptions for rape and incest, argued as he pushed the body to make the bill more severe. “There's nothing good about this,” Ringer said. “This is just pretty tragic.”

In a strategic move, Democrats on the Senate Medical Affairs Committee abstained from the vote that could have blocked the amendment removing the exception for rape and incest, an apparent gamble that the more extreme version of the abortion ban would more likely fail before the full Senate—or at the very least if it went back to the House. Last week, an abortion ban that didn’t include exceptions for rape and incest failed in the House. As State Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto framed it, Republicans “need to own” the extremism of their reproductive health policies in South Carolina. But the amended version that passed in the Senate on Thursday night is largely similar to the bill that passed the House, increasing the likelihood of its passage.

This fight in South Carolina offers a window into the baffling, high-risk policy taking hold at the state level ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer, ending federal protection for abortion rights. Republican legislatures in states across the country are careening toward more and more extreme antiabortion policies, even as public opinion remains in favor of abortion access. "You can't put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. Exceptions do not make abortion restrictions less harmful. We, as lawmakers, should not be in a position to decide who gets an abortion and who does not get an abortion,” said state Senator Marlon Kimpson, a Democrat. Governor McMaster has called for legislation lacking any and all exceptions. “He will sign whatever Republicans send his way,” Ringer said.