South Carolina’s new all-male highest court on Wednesday reversed course on abortion rights, upholding the state’s strict six-week ban on the procedure.
The panel overrode an earlier decision in which the court decided a similar restriction was unconstitutional.
The court on Wednesday found that the state constitution’s protection against “unreasonable invasions of privacy” did not include a right to abortion, and that the state law was “within the zone of reasonable policy decisions rationally related to the state’s interest in protecting the unborn”.
A judge in May had put a temporary halt to South Carolina’s new law banning most abortions around six weeks of pregnancy until the state supreme court could review the measure.
The ruling at the time, by Judge Clifton Newman, came just about 24 hours after the state governor, Henry McMaster, signed the bill, and meant South Carolina reverted back to a ban at about 20 weeks after fertilization.
The new ruling is a blow to reproductive rights campaigners. On Wednesday, McMaster hailed the decision, issuing a statement saying: “The supreme court’s ruling marks a historic moment in our state’s history and is the culmination of years of hard work and determination by so many in our state to ensure that the sanctity of life is protected.”
It went on: “With this victory, we protect the lives of countless unborn children and reaffirm South Carolina’s place as one of the most pro-life states in America.”
The decision was 4-1, with the chief justice, Donald Beatty, in the minority.
“This decision is devastating not only because of the impact it will have on South Carolinians, but also because South Carolina is a critical state for access across the entire south-east region,” said Caroline Sacerdote, a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights who helped bring the lawsuit against the new six-week ban.
“This morning, our clients had patients coming in from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, patients who had traveled overnight to access critical, essential healthcare.”
Because of Wednesday’s ruling, Sacerdote said providers had to turn away those patients to adhere to the six-week ban.
Greenville Women’s Clinic, one of just three abortion providers in South Carolina, had a full waiting room of patients seeking the procedure on Wednesday morning, according to Sacerdote.
It is unclear how abortion rights supporters will battle the latest six-week ban in South Carolina.
During last year’s special legislative session on the original six-week ban, South Carolina Republican lawmakers continually refused to create a ballot measure that would ask voters if they support the right to abortion. Unlike states such as Ohio and Michigan, South Carolina does not give citizens the power to create their own ballot measures. Only the legislature can create a ballot measure on abortion.
Vicki Ringer, the director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said South Carolina lawmakers were afraid to pose the question of abortion access directly to voters.
“They have seen, just like we all have, all of these states that have put abortion on the ballot, the people have come out in droves to support safe, legal abortion,” Ringer said in a press conference on Wednesday.
The South Carolina legislature also has the power to select the justices on the state’s high court.
Catherine Humphreville, an attorney with Planned Parenthood, said the South Carolina supreme court upheld the six-week ban despite striking down “a nearly identical law” in January.
“The only thing that changed since January is the makeup of the court,” Humphreville said.
The reversal in today’s ruling signals a new court that will “do the bidding of anti-abortion politicians”, according to Humphreville.
When the state legislature passed the hotly contested bill in May, the vote went mostly along party lines, with the notable exception of the state senate’s five female members – three Republicans, a Democrat and an independent – who all opposed it.
The new law came after the state supreme court in January struck down a previous abortion law, by a 3-2 vote.
However, the author of that ruling, Justice Kaye Hearn, has since retired. South Carolina’s Republican legislature in February replaced Hearn, who was the sole woman on the five-member court, with Justice Garrison Hill, who voted to uphold the new law on Wednesday.
Justice John Few also switched his vote, finding that the new law addressed gaps in the old one by explaining the legislature’s rationale more fully and by requiring health insurance plans to cover contraception.
Beatty, in dissent, said the new law was essentially the same as the previous one that the court had struck down and that the court should have followed its earlier finding.
“Today’s result will surely weigh heavily upon the public and our state’s medical professionals, in light of the threat of criminal penalties placed upon practitioners and the serious harm that could occur to women who could be denied reproductive healthcare during this uncertainty,” he wrote.
The win for anti-abortion lobby and ultra-conservative legislators in the state general assembly came just over a year after the US supreme court overturned the federal right to seek an abortion in the US when it struck down Roe v Wade, giving power to the individual states to legislate on the matter.
