Protesters gather outside a meeting on a near-total abortion ban on March 4, 2025. (Photo by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — Republican legislators re-opened debate Tuesday on another attempt to ban nearly all abortions in South Carolina, carrying out a promise by the House’s most strident abortion foes, but the chamber’s GOP leader urged his colleagues to press pause.
The packed hearing came as state Supreme Court justices are still weighing whether the state’s 2023 law outlaws abortions at six or nine weeks of pregnancy.
Legislators should wait on their ruling before advancing any new abortion proposal, House Majority Leader Davey Hiott, R-Pickens, said in a statement issued during the hearing.
“While my steadfast pro-life view is unwavering, and while the vast majority of members of our Republican Caucus share this same commitment, I believe we should consider the importance of waiting for any guidance that may be forthcoming from the Supreme Court,” his statement read.
A House Judiciary subcommittee listened to three hours of testimony, mostly from opponents, but took no vote. Dozens of people who lined up outside couldn’t even get into the meeting, which was held in the House office building’s largest hearing room. Both it and an overflow room filled up.
The so-called “fetal heartbeat” law that took effect in August 2023 has been called a six-week ban. But, as argued by attorneys for Planned Parenthood in its latest challenge before the state’s high court, there is no actual heartbeat in a fetus at six weeks, but rather electrical impulses in a developing embryo.
The bill taken up Tuesday would delete all mentions of a fetal heartbeat from state law.
It would prohibit all abortions in South Carolina except those needed to save the mother’s life or prevent lifelong health problems. It would delete the law’s exceptions for victims of rape or incest. It would also delete the exception for fatal fetal anomalies.
It specifies that birth control, including intrauterine devices and emergency contraception, would still be legal. As would in vitro fertilization, which has become a point of concern over whether frozen embryos would be considered children under the law.
“This is not a total ban,” said Rep. John McCravy, a Greenwood Republican. “We hear this over and over again. We have numerous exceptions in this bill for the life or the serious health of the mother.”
With 39 Republican sponsors, nearly a third of the House has signed onto the bill. Among them are House Speaker Murrell Smith and Hiott.
McCravy, a leader of the Legislature’s Family Caucus, has been the chief sponsor of all the chamber’s abortion ban proposals since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and returned the legality of abortions to the states. His previous attempts for a near-total ban failed in the state Senate. He vowed to try again in 2025.
The upper chamber does look different after last year’s elections. Four of the five female senators who helped defeat the House proposals are gone. All three Republican “sister senators” lost their re-election bids in the GOP primary.
The Senate’s 13 new members — the chamber’s highest number of freshmen in decades — include four Republicans who ousted Democrats in November, giving the Senate a GOP supermajority for the first time since Reconstruction.
That could open the door for the Senate to reconsider a near-total ban, Hiott said.
But the Senate’s changed makeup doesn’t necessarily mean the outcome will flip. During last year’s campaigns, some of those freshmen were unwilling to support an all-out ban.
While House Republicans wait to hear what the state Supreme Court has to say on the 2023 law, they should focus on making sure the bill has the support it needs to pass the Senate, Hiott said.
Sen. Tom Davis, whose filibuster killed a similar bill in fall 2022 when there weren’t the necessary 26 votes to end it, vowed to filibuster again. He said he hasn’t tallied where senators are on the issue, but he’d try regardless.
“There’s certainly a desire among some senators to have it taken up again,” the Beaufort Republican said. “If it’s taken up again, I would oppose it the same way I did back in 2022.”
The number of abortions in the state dwindled after the last Supreme Court ruling upheld the Legislature’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” law in August 2023, according to the most recent data released by the state Department of Public Health. From January to August of that year, doctors performed an average of 930 abortions per month. That dropped to 187 each month for the rest of that year, according to the data.
That’s still too many, McCravy said.
Making abortions illegal won’t stop them, said Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg. Instead, women will seek out more dangerous, at-home options, he said.
“I have heard the stories of the coat hanger days,” Bamberg said, referring to a method used by desperate women before Roe v. Wade made abortions through the second trimester legal nationwide in 1973. “Women die from that, right?”
Testimony
Opponents testified how the existing law has endangered women, despite the exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal anomalies.
Doctors fearful of prosecution and losing their license are refusing to perform abortions, even if they could be legal under the law, they said.
Four months ago, Tori Nardone learned her pregnancy was underdeveloped. Nardone was in her second trimester, but her second child’s heart and brain were not growing the way they should, she told the subcommittee Tuesday.
Doctors suspected a chromosomal abnormality, though they were unable to collect the sample they needed to prove it. Without the sample, doctors declined to end her pregnancy, so she traveled to another state for an abortion, she said.
“I can’t imagine having to go through this experience twice with even more unnecessary restrictions that completely disregard my and my family’s wellbeing,” Nardone said.
The proposed, near-total ban would repeat the medical conditions specified in existing law as a medical emergency that would make an abortion legal. But doctors testified they don’t provide any clarity, repeating arguments made in a federal lawsuit filed in January.
“This bill ties the hands of physicians and their ability to help patients,” said Dr. Dawn Bingham, a Columbia OB-GYN, who is among a group of doctors challenging the law.
In a state that already has a shortage of obstetricians and gynecologists, fear over retribution could cause even more to leave and keep newcomers from moving to South Carolina, about a dozen doctors said.
The bill would maintain the existing law’s penalty for doctors caught performing illegal abortions — a fine of up to $10,000 and up to two years in prison. Doctors could also lose their license.
In 2021, 15 of the state’s 46 counties had no OB-GYN doctors, according to the most recent report by the state Office for Healthcare Workforce.
When Katee Wyant goes on maternity leave, the only other OB-GYN at her practice in Manning will have to be on call around the clock to take care of their patients. Wyant and her partner are trying to hire a third partner to help cover some pregnancies, but many of the candidates they interview say they don’t want to practice in a state with a restrictive abortion law, Wyant said.
“I would like to work in this job for a very long time, but this bill makes it very hard for me to do so,” Wyant said.
Supporters of the bill, who made up four of the 40 people who spoke Tuesday, argued tightening restrictions is necessary to protect patients from procedures they see as dangerous and prevent women from having abortions.
The bill addresses “the unique obstetric doctor-patient relationship in which the physician has the moral obligation to care for two patients simultaneously,” said Peter Bleyer, a retired family medical specialist from Little River.