South Carolina senate passes bill tightening abortion restrictions, fails to pass total ban News
Billy Hathorn, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
South Carolina senate passes bill tightening abortion restrictions, fails to pass total ban

The South Carolina Senate Thursday passed H.5399, a bill tightening abortion restrictions. South Carolina’s existing abortion law, the Fetal Heartbeat Protection From Abortion Act, is currently pending in front of the state’s Supreme Court. Legislators debated for two days between maintaining exceptions for rape, incest and fetal abnormality or passing a complete abortion ban.

Current South Caroline law prohibits abortions generally after six weeks and after 20 weeks in cases of incest or rape. Thursday’s action reduces the timeframe for abortion in cases of incest or rape to 12 weeks. The new bill also requires physicians to report any abortions they have performed under the rape and incest exception to local law enforcement and take a DNA sample from the fetal remains for law enforcement to collect as evidence.

Senator Shane Massey supported a complete abortion ban but conceded that he did not have the votes to pass it. Massey and other complete abortion ban supporters accepted the more moderate abortion ban proposals. In the end, 27 senators voted for the bill, and 16 senators voted against the bill.

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