South Carolina Supreme Court strikes down state's 6-week abortion ban

Devyani Chhetri and Christine Fernando, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday put an end to a two-year battle against the state's six-week abortion ban.

In a 3-2 ruling, the court ruled that The Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, which banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape and incest, violated a constitutional right to privacy.

"We hold that the decision to terminate a pregnancy rests upon the utmost personal and private considerations imaginable, and implicates a woman's right to privacy," said the majority opinion written by Justice Kaye Hearn, the only woman on the bench.

"While this right is not absolute, and must be balanced against the State's interest in protecting unborn life, this Act, which severely limits — and in many instances completely forecloses — abortion, is an unreasonable restriction upon a woman's right to privacy and is therefore unconstitutional," the ruling said.

As of Wednesday's ruling, the state has reverted back to its 2016 law banning most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

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"The court’s decision means that our patients can continue to come to us, their trusted health care providers, to access abortion and other essential health services in South Carolina," Jenny Black, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said in a statement. "This is a monumental victory in the movement to protect legal abortion in the South."

South Carolina's constitution distinctly protects a citizen's right to privacy, the judges said. Justices also disagreed with the state government's narrow interpretation of privacy rights. Earlier, the state government argued privacy rights were only limited to protection from "search and seizure" found in data leak concerns and dissemination of personal information.

Though the state has the authority to limit privacy rights in the state's interest, any limitation put forward must "be reasonable" and "must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy," the majority opinion said.

"Six weeks is, quite simply, not a reasonable period of time for these two things to occur," they said in their decision.

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In their footnotes, justices also made a note that while the General Assembly chose to use the term "fetus" to apply to the early stage of gestation and in the nomenclature of the law itself, the term "fetal heartbeat" was inconsistent with medical science.

According to medical experts, at six weeks, the fetus has no heart. The sounds heard are pulses visible on an ultrasound.

The two-year battle against the six-week law began in 2021 when Gov. Henry McMaster signed the legislation after it was passed overwhelmingly by a Republican supermajority in the General Assembly.

Immediately after the law was signed, Planned Parenthood and Greenville Women's Clinic, the sole abortion providers in the state, moved to block the law in federal court. The federal court granted the injunction. Once the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the injunction was reversed. Abortion providers filed a new challenge − this time in the state court, arguing the six-week ban violated the state's constitution.

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Abortion providers and advocates applauded the decision to strike down South Carolina's six-week abortion ban.

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the move "an immense victory" for South Carolinians in a region where abortion access has been largely decimated by state restrictions.

"The court justly rejected this insidious attempt to take away South Carolinians’ fundamental rights under the state’s constitution," Northup said in a statement.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the ruling was "a win for freedom."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: South Carolina 6-week abortion ban struck down by state Supreme Court