South Carolina Supreme Court Thursday overturned a state ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, ruling that the law violates the state’s constitutional right to privacy.
The 3-2 decision comes nearly seven months after a bombarded US Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion.
President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, tweeted, “We’re encouraged by today’s South Carolina Supreme Court ruling on the state’s extreme and dangerous abortion ban.”
“Women should have the option to come to a decision for themselves about their bodies,” wrote Jean-Pierre.
Decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court is predicated on the state’s own structure, which, unlike the US structure, explicitly grants residents the right to privacy.
“We imagine that the decision to terminate the pregnancy is predicated on the most personal and personal considerations possible and implies a lady’s right to pregnancy,” Judge Kaye Hearn wrote in the majority opinion.
“While this right just isn’t absolute and have to be balanced against the state’s interest in protecting unborn life, this bill, which severely restricts – and in lots of cases excludes – abortion, is an unreasonable restriction on a lady’s right to privacy and is due to this fact unconstitutional,” Hearn wrote.
Defenders of the abortion ban have argued that the state’s right to privacy applies only to criminal defendants in the context of protection from unreasonable search and seizure, given the explicit reference to this protection in the structure.
But that argument was rejected by Hearn and the two justices who joined her in the majority ruling: Chief Justice Donald Beatty and Justice John Few.
She noted that the structure detailed not only protections “against unreasonable searches and seizures” but additionally protections against “unreasonable invasions of privacy”.
Hearn also wrote that any restrictions on abortion “have to be reasonable” and permit the woman enough time to “determine that she is pregnant and take reasonable steps to terminate her pregnancy.”
“Six weeks is just an unreasonable period of time for those two things to occur,” she wrote.
Thursday’s ruling leaves intact the state’s existing ban on most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The South Carolina General Assembly in 2021 passed a bill banning abortions when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is frequently heard after about six weeks of pregnancy.
This prohibition included exceptions in cases of life-threatening pregnancies and pregnancies attributable to rape or incest.
The law was blocked from enactment by federal courts until the June 24 U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal abortion law that had been in place since Roe v. Wade in 1973.
South Carolina’s abortion ban was blocked again in August, this time by the state’s Supreme Court, after a latest lawsuit was filed to overturn it. That lawsuit led to Thursday’s ruling overturning the law.
In Thursday’s dissent, Justice John Kittredge wrote that the constitutional reference to “unwarranted invasion of privacy” was “ambiguous wording.”
“There is no such thing as a wording in Article I, Section 10 of the South Carolina Structure that supports an interpretation of the right to privacy that features the right to an abortion,” Kittredge wrote.
“The language of ‘unwarranted invasion of privacy’ is an element of the search and seizure clause and just isn’t a standalone provision,” he wrote.
The United States Supreme Court decision invalidating the federal abortion law effectively left it as much as the individual states to control the issue of abortion. A dozen states effectively banned abortion after this ruling.
But lower than two months after the ruling, voters in Kansas rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that will have stripped the state of abortion rights.
In November, voters in Kentucky rejected a measure that will have stripped the state’s constitutional right to abortion. In Michigan, voters supported adding abortion rights to the state structure.