By Skylar Laird
SCDailyGazette.com
COLUMBIA — The state Supreme Court will hear arguments in February as to whether a 2023 law actually bans abortions in South Carolina at six weeks — or whether the legal cutoff should be at nine weeks instead.
Arguments are set for 10:30 a.m., Feb. 12.
It will be the third time since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022 that the state’s highest court will consider a challenge to the state’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” law.
This time, instead of considering whether the law violates the state constitution’s ban against unreasonable invasions of privacy, the justices will decide at what point in a pregnancy abortions become illegal.
In a 3-2 split ruling in January 2023, justices threw out the Legislature’s initial six-week ban as unconstitutional. The Legislature then passed a new law that was nearly identical in what it banned, but with tweaks that addressed one justice’s dissent. Eight months later, a newly all-male high court upheld that law 4-1.
Unlike the last two challenges before justices, this one is an appeal of a lower court’s ruling.
After the high court declined to directly take Planned Parenthood’s dispute of the ban’s timing, the organization sued in Richland County court in February, arguing the law’s language should allow abortions for several more weeks.
The law itself does not set the ban by weeks of gestation. Instead, it bans abortions, with limited exceptions, once an ultrasound detects sounds of “cardiac activity, or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart, within the gestational sac.”
At six weeks, an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity. But that activity is not steady, repetitive or rhythmic, attorneys for Planned Parenthood argued in front of a Circuit Court judge in May. By six weeks, a fetus has not developed a heart to beat yet, attorneys said.
Legislators’ intentions were clear in passing the law, attorneys for the state replied. Opponents and proponents alike have referred to the law as a six-week ban, proving that legislators meant for it to take effect at that point, they said.
Circuit Court Judge Daniel Coble agreed with the state, writing in his ruling that legislators “could not have been more clear” about what they intended.
Planned Parenthood appealed the ruling. Since justices last heard arguments about the law, their bench is no longer all male.
The Legislature elected Court of Appeals Judge Letitia Verdin in June. She was elected to fill the opening created by the retirement of former Chief Justice Don Beatty, who was the lone justice in the 4-1 ruling that allowed the 2023 law to take effect.
Skylar Laird covers the South Carolina Legislature and criminal justice issues. Originally from Missouri, she previously worked for The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau. S.C. Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
