COLOMBIA, SC (AP) – A lawsuit that challenges the new ban on most abortions in South Carolina is “probable,” wrote a judge on Friday, ruling that abortions can continue until the process is resolved.
Supporting a Planned Parenthood request, the decision of U.S. District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis essentially mirrors previous fragmented extensions of an injunction suspending the law. Its most recent extension was set to expire on Friday.
Lewis initially suspended the “South Carolina Fetal Heartbeat and Abortion Protection Act” on its second day in effect, after a Planned Parenthood lawsuit. The measure requires doctors to perform ultrasound to check the fetus for a heartbeat, which can usually be detected about six weeks after conception. If cardiac activity is detected, abortion can only be performed if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, or if the mother’s life is in danger.
About a dozen other states have approved similar or more restrictive abortion bans, which could come into effect if the U.S. Supreme Court – with three judges appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump – ousted Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court ruling that supported abortion rights. Federal law replaces state law.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed the bill less than an hour after state lawmakers sent it to him. Opponents have argued that many women do not know that they are pregnant at six weeks, especially if they are not trying to conceive. And, they argue, with such an early deadline, the law gives women little time to consider whether to have an abortion.
Planned Parenthood said the initial restraining order was needed in South Carolina in part because more than 75 women should have had an abortion in the state over the next three days, and most would have been denied under the new law.
Earlier this month, state lawyers argued that the law should go into effect while the lawsuit is in progress. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson and Walt Wilkins, the two-county prosecutor at Conservative Upstate, previously wrote in court documents that an earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a partial birth abortion ban “suggests that a preliminary injunction should be denied here “and that the process would probably not withstand legal scrutiny. Lewis disagreed, however, writing that, “because the Court considers (that) the Act prohibits abortion months before any fetus could be viable, Claimants are likely to succeed in their claim that the Act is unconstitutional.”
Citing a series of cases, Lewis noted that “courts have universally invalidated laws that prohibit abortion from a gestational age prior to viability.”
“This case doesn’t come close,” Lewis wrote in a section largely focused on his argument that a judge’s personal policy plays no role in the orders.
Lewis, a nominee for the Obama administration, took the unusual step of blaming the media, which she says “unwittingly or not … tends to fuel this narrative, often noting the name of the president who appointed the federal judge assigned to a particular politically divisive subject like this. ”
She went on to call such a suggestion “ill-informed at best and highly offensive at worst”.
“We judges are not politicians in cloak,” she added. “In fact, based on the law, the Court is unable to understand how another court could decide this issue differently than the way this Court has decided.”
The new law does not punish pregnant women for having an illegal abortion, but the person performing the procedure can be charged with a crime, sentenced to up to two years and a $ 10,000 fine if found guilty.
South Carolina has three clinics that offer abortion in its largest metropolitan areas – Charleston, Columbia and Greenville – and none of them perform abortions after the first trimester. Two of them have abortions only twice a week, according to Planned Parenthood.
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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http: //twitter.com.MegKinnardAP.
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