South Carolina’s state supreme court upheld the state’s six-week abortion ban in a decision issued on Wednesday, in a disappointing loss for Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, which operates clinics in South Carolina, sued over the state’s abortion ban, which outlaws the procedure after the emergence of a “fetal heartbeat”. Generally, these kinds of “heartbeat” bans have been interpreted to prohibit abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, when providers can detect cardiac activity from a fetus.
But because a fetus’s heart is not formed until nine weeks of pregnancy, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic argued that such activity does not constitute a real “heartbeat”. Instead of outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, the reproductive health organization said, South Carolina should permit the procedure until nine weeks.
The South Carolina supreme court rejected that argument. Legislators, the justices wrote in a 5-0 ruling, clearly intended for the law to ban abortion after six weeks.
“We count at least sixty separate instances during the 2023 legislative session in which a member of the House or Senate referred to the 2023 Act as a six-week ban on abortion,” Justice John Few wrote in the majority opinion. Few added: “In particular, we could find not one instance during the entire 2023 legislative session in which anyone connected in any way to the General Assembly framed the Act as banning abortion after approximately nine weeks.”
Abortion is banned at six weeks of pregnancy or at conception throughout the south-eastern US.
South Carolina and Planned Parenthood South Atlantic are also at the center of another legal dispute around abortion. Last month, the US supreme court heard arguments in a case over South Carolina’s attempt to kick the group out of its state Medicaid program because Planned Parenthood provides abortion. If the supreme court sides with South Carolina, its decision could pave the way for other red states to cut Planned Parenthood out of their Medicaid programs – and financially devastate the organization.
