On Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the state’s six-week, pro life abortion ban.
With the departure and retirement of leftist Senator Luke Rankin’s preferred Judge Kay Hearn earlier this year, most pundits forecasted the court would now uphold the legislation as legal.
Hearn wrote the majority opinion in 2022 that struck down the law as illegal.
In June, abortionists Planned Parenthood filed suit against the law and argued before the state Supreme Court, which ruled 4-1.
“To be clear, our decision today is in no way intended to denigrate or exalt any of the valid concerns on either side of the abortion debate, whether these concerns are based on privacy, morality, medicine, religion, bodily autonomy, or something else,” reads the majority decision, written by Justice John Kittredge.
The majority’s primary argument is that the rule of law does not allow the High Court to be a legislative body and that the state legislature amended the six-week pro life abortion ban legislation intentionally after the Supreme Court struck down an initial version of a similar law from 2021.
“The 2023 Act appears to have been crafted carefully by the South Carolina General Assembly in order to demonstrate that its policy decision was not arbitrary,” Kittredge wrote.
In the case, oral arguments focused heavily on whether a pregnant woman can reliably know she is pregnant at six weeks and whether a fetal heartbeat can be accurately detected at that time.
Across the country, millions of women know that they are pregnant within enough of a window to seek an abortion before six weeks gestation, with the majority of abortions occurring very early in pregnancy in the United States.
The only dissenting vote came from Chief Justice Donald Beatty, who questioned the state attorneys during oral arguments whether the “emotional trauma” of an unintended pregnancy was comparable to that of rape or incest.
As a staunch supporter of the pro life abortion ban measure, Gov. Henry McMaster (R) called the ruling a “historic moment” and the culmination of years of effort and determination in our state.
The verdict has not yet been announced by Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. However, Democrats intend to use abortion rights as a key campaign effort in the 2024 elections. It is practically the key wedge issue the Democrats have in their arsenal to compete against an otherwise failing government controlled largely by the DNC.
My statement on the S.C. Supreme Court’s ruling that will protect the lives of countless unborn children: pic.twitter.com/4gM9SEuVlb
— Gov. Henry McMaster (@henrymcmaster) August 23, 2023