Editor’s Note: This editorial was published in today’s issue of the Charleston City Paper, our sister publication.
And now we start seeing the pain.
Too many South Carolina women are hurting and scared because of blinders worn by conservative state lawmakers, mostly White men, hellbent on controlling lives, decisions and bodies. It’s the 21st century, but these prudish, unenlightened South Carolina officials are acting as if the times are more like those when slavery was legal.
Since the South Carolina Supreme Court flipped its view last August that a statewide abortion ban was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, hundreds of women in the Palmetto State have been suffering, forced to have babies that they don’t want for a variety of reasons. Or they have to go outside of South Carolina to have an abortion that was legal here just three years ago.
Legal abortion is a safe medical procedure used by one in four women in the U.S. during child-bearing years, medical experts agree. Women who opt for abortions do so for a variety of personal — and sometimes medical — reasons. But because South Carolina now has a so-called “fetal heartbeat” law that essentially bans abortions six weeks after a woman gets pregnant — a time that many do not even know they’re pregnant — conditions are untenable.
In recent months, Planned Parenthood clinics here turned away 75% of women who sought abortions, according to a new lawsuit seeking clarification of the ban. From Aug. 23, 2023, to Jan. 31, 2024, the organization, which operates two of the three clinics in South Carolina, turned away 906 of 1,209 women who sought abortions. Of those, 778 had pregnancies that were nine weeks or less from their last menstrual period.
In the same span a year earlier, the clinics provided 1,819 abortions. “Put differently, over the same period of time, [Planned Parenthood] was able to provide less than 17% of the abortions it did before the act went into effect, and the number of people making abortion appointments dropped substantially.”
South Carolina resident Taylor Shelton and Planned Parenthood now are suing. Shelton says she realized she was pregnant — even though she was using birth control — in her fourth week. She tried to follow the rules in South Carolina, but couldn’t get the treatment she wanted. She was forced to make expensive, time-consuming trips to North Carolina to get the safe treatment she sought.
“I was forced to jump through so many unnecessary hoops in order to receive the care I deserved,” Shelton said in a statement. “The entire experience left me angry and quite frankly, traumatized. I want everyone to understand the impact South Carolina’s abortion restrictions and unfair treatment are having on real people, and I hope my story shows how punitive and cruel these abortion bans actually are.”
The state’s courts need to approve a request for an injunction from the draconian abortion ban as it clarifies the case before it. Otherwise, more of South Carolina’s women will suffer under this unsafe, unhealthy law that needs to be thrown out like the trash it is.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
What is the underlying principle of anti-abortion legislators? Is it that the putative potential of the fetus outweighs the value and plans of the women in whom it resides?
Prior to fertilization, that same ovum also had potential — maybe to discover an important medical cure or become a great South Carolina legislator. Even so, few of those same anti-abortion legislators would deny that woman the absolute right to not allow that ovum to be fertilized, to let it perish, its potential lost forever.
If those legislators want to argue that that ovum had no potential until it had combined with a few strands of DNA from a man’s sperm, then maybe their underlying anti-abortion principle is male supremacy, or maybe even just political power.
The biological reality is that the woman is the sole source – apart from those stray strands of a man’s DNA – of every molecule that will contribute to that developing fetus, blood of her blood, bone of her bone. Demanding that she submit to this undesired and uncompensated labor suggests the underlying anti-abortion principle may echo the secessionist values of their 1860 predecessors. Or, maybe it is punishment for daring to have sex for pleasure rather than progeny.
Some of those anti-abortion legislators may support adding advisory questions to the ballot, such as requiring registration by party, or apportioning blame in tort cases. How about putting the question of whether the SC Constitution right to privacy includes abortion to a vote of the citizens?