Rape and incest exceptions out of South Carolina abortion bill

COLUMBIA, S.C. —  A South Carolina Senate committee voted Tuesday to remove exceptions for rape and incest from a proposed abortion ban, setting up a showdown among Republicans wary of passing such a restrictive bill.

Democrats helped set up the fight, choosing not to vote with three moderate Republicans who wanted to keep the exceptions in the bill.

The same bill without the exceptions appeared to fail in the more conservative state House last week before some Republicans maneuvered through a series of votes to allow abortions for rape and incest victims up to the 12th week of pregnancy.

The Senate Medical Affairs Committee voted 9 to 8 on Tuesday, with two Republicans joining all Democrats — to send the bill to the full Senate, where debate is expected to begin Wednesday morning. The exceptions could be restored during that debate.

Democrats also refused to vote on other proposals by Republican Sen. Tom Davis, who has said for weeks that the bill needs to be modified from a total ban before he can support it.

The proposals included increasing access to contraceptives and including birth control as part of the state’s abstinence-based sex education, as well as ensuring that a doctor can perform an abortion if it is determined a fetus has a medical condition that won’t allow it to live outside the womb.

Democrats are not going to help Republicans out of a box of their own making by turning “an awful bill” into “a very bad bill,” Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto said.

We are “highlighting the fact a bunch of extreme, Republican men are trying to control women’s decisions in South Carolina — they need to own that. The governor needs to own that,” Hutto told reporters.

Republicans told their Democratic colleagues their strategy was shortsighted.

“We heard a lot of talk about protecting women’s rights. It looks like when they had a chance, they didn’t,” Republican Sen. Michael Gambrel said.

Several Republicans senators have said they cannot support the bill without the exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape and incest. There are 30 Republicans and 16 Democrats in the state Senate.

Senators will get another chance to change the bill Wednesday, including adding the exceptions back or making amendments that were rejected at Tuesday’s meeting.

The bill bans all abortions in South Carolina except when the mother’s life is at risk. It previously also included exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. In those cases, the doctor would have had to tell the woman the rape would be reported and her name given to the county sheriff within 24 hours of the procedure. The bill would have allowed abortions in those cases only up to 12 weeks after conception.

The proposal also starts child support payments at the date of conception and requires a father to pay half of pregnancy expenses, including the mother’s share of insurance premiums. The father of a child conceived by rape or incest must also pay the full cost of mental counseling for the attack.

South Carolina currently has a ban on abortions once electric activity can be detected within cells that will become a fetus’ heart, which is usually about six weeks. But that law has been suspended as the South Carolina Supreme Court reviews whether it violates the state’s constitutional right to privacy. That leaves South Carolina’s older 20-week abortion ban as the current benchmark.

Abortion bans have had mixed success in state legislatures since Roe vs. Wade was overturned in June. Indiana passed a ban in August that goes into effect later this month, with exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother. West Virginia’s Legislature could not agree on stricter rules during a special session in July.

And lawmakers in South Carolina suddenly started paying much closer attention to Kansas when nearly 60% of voters rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed the state’s Legislature to ban abortion. The two states voted for then-President Trump in nearly identical percentages in the 2020 election.

Davis and fellow Republican Sen. Sandy Senn, who voted against the bill in committee, have said they can’t support it as written. Another GOP senator, Katrina Shealy, has said the state’s current law is fine.

Other senators have suggested privately that the General Assembly didn’t need to rush into a special session and could have waited to see how South Carolina’s six-week ban and total bans in other states worked out.

Davis told the committee he thinks the rights of a mother who is pregnant to control her own body have to be balanced with the rights of fetuses to their lives, so he considers both a ban on all abortions and allowing abortions at any stage of pregnancy too extreme.

Davis also said that if the state is going to require more women to have babies, then it owes them birth control options and better prenatal care, and owes their children better educational opportunities.