The majority of abortions are now prohibited in South Carolina after six weeks when fetal heart activity starts.
The contentious legislation was largely passed along partisan lines, with the notable exception of the five female state senate members who opposed it: three Republicans, a Democrat, and an independent. Republican Governor Henry McMaster is expected to sign the legislation.
State Senator Sandy Senn, a Republican who was one of the five female senators who successfully blocked an even stricter ban last month, claimed that what we are doing today will increase the number of illegal abortions.
“It is our fault when… your teenagers die as a result of going to get an illegal abortion because they didn’t know they were pregnant before six weeks,” she said.
The Republican-backed plan, which outlaws the majority of abortions before many women even realize they are pregnant, is an updated version of one that the state Supreme Court earlier this year declared illegal. It makes an exception for medical circumstances and permits abortions up to 12 weeks in cases of rape and incest.
If the law is upheld after anticipated legal challenges, it will stop a flow of women from other southern states with strict abortion restrictions from seeking medical attention in South Carolina.
By rejecting the Roe v Wade ruling last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nearly 50-year-old federal right to an abortion, which prompted many other states in the U.S. South to severely restrict abortions.
Republican state senator Shane Massey, who backed the ban, defended it as a way to make South Carolina’s abortion laws more comparable to those of other Southern states and claimed that it had fixed the problems that led the state Supreme Court to rule that it infringed on the state’s constitutional right to privacy.
During the debate, Massey said that South Carolina has turned into the Southeast’s epicenter for abortion.
Advocates for abortion rights announced that they would file a new lawsuit to invalidate the law.
“We’ll see you in court,” Planned Parenthood South Atlantic posted on Twitter moments after Tuesday’s vote.
