By Lindsay Street, Statehouse correspondent | The state Senate is readying for a second showdown in two years over a bill seeking to restrict access to abortions in South Carolina. And while this new bill is different and under different circumstances, some on both sides of the hot-button issue are still looking to 2018 for lessons.
Last year, the House passed H. 3020, known as the Fetal Heartbeat Protection Act. The bill seeks to ban abortion in most cases after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which usually occurs about six weeks gestation. During the off-session, the Senate Medical Affairs Committee and its subcommittee met on the issue. After removing exceptions for rape and incest, it passed the committee, and is now ready for the Senate floor and could be among the first items taken up with the session reconvenes Jan. 14.
If the ban passes the Senate, Gov. Henry McMaster has vowed to sign the bill, having a huge impact on South Carolinians. In 2018, 4,646 abortions were reported to S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC). Of those, 55.8 percent — 2,596 — were performed after 7 weeks gestation.
- South Carolina is part of a trend of red states passing stricter abortion laws. Georgia’s similar restrictions, passed in 2019, has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
For Republicans, there is math to work out: 26 of the Senate’s 27 Republicans will need to vote in lockstep to advance H. 3020 onto the calendar for debate, and they will need that same majority to prevent a filibuster, according to House Majority Leader Shane Massey of Edgefield.
“I would love to push it but we don’t have the votes and, after talking with other Republican senators, I’m even more convinced now we don’t have the votes than we did before (in 2018),” Massey said. “This is not where you got some people in the middle who maybe could be persuaded by debate. This is an issue where people know where they are and they know where they are going to be.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are prepared for a drawn-out battle in an election year.
Lobbyists on both sides are encouraging constituents to reach out to their senators and voice their opinions.
“The most important thing really is for constituents, for the public, to speak up about the bill. The legislators have gotten accustomed to debating abortion bans, different types year after year, and I think in some ways have gotten numb to it and just sort of expect to have to battle these bans every year,” S.C. Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network CEO Ann Warner said. “It should be mobilizing for people across the state.”
A look at 2018
Senate Democrats were able to defeat a bill in 2018 that sought to curb a procedure for fewer than three in 1,000 abortions that occur in the state.
The bill, H. 3548, called for a ban of “dismemberment” abortions, which is an anti-abortion term for the medical procedure known as “dilation and evacuation.” According to DHECl, 13 of the 4,646 abortions reported in 2018 were classified as “dialtion and evacuation.”
After passing the House, the narrow bill hit the Senate floor with days left in the session, where Orangeburg Democratic Sen. Brad Hutto amended the bill to include almost all abortions — turning the bill into one of the most expansive in the nation. It was a dare he issued to Republicans:
“Every year in multiple forums, some form of abortion debate comes to the Senate and ties us up in knots,” Hutto said this past May. “This will remove the incentive to argue this over and over and over again because (if passed it would be) in the courts for the next three years.”
The Senate Democrats also launched a concerted filibuster.
Senators had to choose whether to continue debate and not pass waiting bills, or recommit the abortion restriction to committee. With the bill made “more aggressive” and the clock clicking down, it lost the votes needed to prevent filibustering and keep it from being recommitted to committee.
“The calendar was on our side,” Charleston Democratic Sen. Marlon Kimpson said. He was among the Democrats who filibustered the bill in 2018. “Because of (Hutto’s amendment and the end of session), we were able to appeal to the moderate Republicans since the bill was now so extreme and we had other pressing matters on the calendar.”
But 2020 debate will be different
In addition to being a more expansive bill, the 2020 debate poses two big differences: it’s an election year with Republicans facing possible primary challenges in March. And, if the Senate gets an early start on the issue, there are four months of session to continue the abortion debate.
“As soon as you figure out what works, the equation always changes,” Walterboro Democratic Sen. Margie Bright Matthews said. “It’s like a chess game, the parts keep moving.”
She said Democrats found success in being a “united front” in 2018, and she expected the same to happen in 2020.
But they may not be able to count on moderate Republicans this time — and that’s the hope of Holly Gatling, executive director for S.C. Citizens for Life, which opposes abortion procedures.
- Ahead of the Jan. 14 start of legislative session, S.C. Citizens for Life will hold its annual Proudly Pro-Life Weekend Jan. 10-11 in Columbia. Info here.
“It’s an election year” Gatling said, declining to elaborate further.
Warner said her organization, which opposes further restrictions on abortion procedures, is worried that could sway moderates in favor of an “extreme” ban.
“Unfortunately, there are too many people who want to play politics with people’s lives. This issue is being exploited for political gain,” Warner said.
Kimpson said that if restricting abortion is “truly a Republican priority, they have the numbers to get it done.”
But even so, Massey said he’s not sure Republicans will have the numbers to bring the bill to the floor, let alone defeat a filibuster.
“The lesson from 2018 is that you don’t have the votes for this one,” Massey said, adding that there is one less Republican in the Senate now, after Richland Democratic Sen. Dick Harpootlian took the seat in a special election later in 2018.
While the debate so far between Democrats and Republicans has been whether the bill is too extreme, at least one Republican senator said the bill does not go far enough. Anderson Sen. Richard Cash has pushed for full “personhood” of embryos and fetuses in the past (S. 485 this session, which has stalled like previous efforts). He said he plans to make amendments on the floor to 3020.
“I’ve tried to make the case for every human being having a right to life,” he said. “I’ll continue to bolster that and make those arguments as strongly as I can.”
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