South Carolina Republican Senator Tom Davis reviews papers on his desk before debating the abortion bill on September 7.
Jeffrey Collins / AP
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Jeffrey Collins / AP
South Carolina Republican Senator Tom Davis reviews papers on his desk before debating the abortion bill on September 7.
Jeffrey Collins / AP
COLUMBIA, SC (AP) — South Carolina senators overturned a ban on almost all abortions Thursday in a special session called after the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade after five Republicans, including all women in the institute, refused to support it.
The 30 Republicans in the 46-member chamber got a majority to pass the ban, but no more votes to end the behavior threatened by Republican Senator Tom Davis.
Davis, chief of staff to former Governor Mark Sanford before being elected to the Senate in 2009, joined three Republican women in the Senate, a fifth Republican colleague and all senators. Democrats to oppose the proposed ban.
Davis said he promised his daughters he wouldn’t vote to make South Carolina’s current six-week abortion ban stricter because women have rights too.
“The moment we got pregnant, we lost all control over what was going on with our bodies,” Davis said, recalling what his daughter told him. “I’m here to tell you I won’t let that happen.
After a respite to consider their options, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey acknowledged the abortion ban may not pass.
“We’re never going to pass an outright ban on abortion,” Massey said. “We never had the votes to pass even what the House of Representatives passed.”
Senators passed a number of changes to the 6-week ban, including cutting the time during which pregnant rape and incest victims can get an abortion from 20 weeks to about 12 weeks and requiring requested the police to collect DNA from the aborted fetus. The bill returned to the House of Representatives, passing a ban with exceptions for rape or incest.
South Carolina’s six-week ban is currently suspended as the state Supreme Court considers whether it violates privacy rights. Meanwhile, the state’s 2016 ban on abortions 20 weeks after conception went into effect.
The South Carolina General Assembly is meeting in a special session to try to join more than a dozen other states with bans on abortion.
Most of them passed so-called trigger laws designed to ban most abortions when the US Supreme Court removed the constitutional right to terminate pregnancies in June. Indiana’s Legislature passed a new ban last month that has yet to go into effect.
The debate began Wednesday with three Republican women in the South Carolina Senate saying the opposite, saying they could not support the bill unless the rape or incest exceptions were restored.
Sen. Katrina Shealy says 41 men in the Senate would be better off listening to their wives, daughters, mothers, nieces and nephews and looking into the faces of girls in Sunday School classes at church their.
“You want to believe that God is asking you to pass a bill without exception that kills mothers and destroys children’s lives – let mothers take their babies home and bury them – then I think. Or maybe you Shealy said before the senators introduced a proposal to allow abortion if the fetus cannot survive outside the womb.
Massey helped broker compromises among Republicans shortly returning exceptions to the bill. He pointed out that state health officials have recorded about 3,000 abortions in 2021 within the first six weeks of pregnancy.
“The heart rate is great, but this one I think is better,” Massey said. “I don’t think abortion should be used as contraception.”
Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto said Republican women have supported all women in South Carolina, while Republican men have let them down. He said Democrats do not want any changes to the existing law.
“There can be a feeling that this is similar to what we had. It’s not. It’s worse in many ways,” said Hutto.
Republican Governor Henry McMaster, who has previously said it would be nice to have no abortions in the state, thinks the Senate’s version strikes the right balance, governor spokesman Brian Symmes said. know
“The Governor is hopeful that the House and Senate will soon reach an agreement and send a bill to his desk for signature,” Symmes said.
Republican Senator Sandy Senn, who did not vote for a six-week ban in 2021, said an outright ban would be an invasion of privacy for every woman in the state.
“If what’s going on in my vagina isn’t an unreasonable invasion of this legislature’s right to privacy, then I don’t know what is,” Senn said.
