A federal judge blocked a pro-life law in South Carolina that prohibits abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which usually occurs around six weeks pregnant.
Late last week, Judge Mary Geiger Lewis granted an injunction blocking the bill, supporting plaintiffs who defied the law. Immediately after the law went into effect, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and a local South Carolina abortion clinic sued the state, arguing that the law violates women’s constitutional right to abortion.
Shortly after Republican Governor Henry McMaster signed the bill last month, the same judge issued a temporary restraining order to prevent it from taking effect while it reviewed the contestants’ arguments. Now she has formally issued an injunction against him, a decision that the state must appeal.
“This state is overwhelmingly in favor of this bill, and we will do whatever it takes – as long as it takes – to ensure that the right to life is protected in South Carolina,” McMaster tweeted on Friday in response to the decision.
In her order to block the bill, Lewis argued that complainants would probably be able to claim that the heartbeat bill is unconstitutional, and she said that “complainants’ patients are likely to suffer irreparable damage in the absence of an injunction” .
When South Carolina approved the bill in mid-February, it became one of about a dozen states to ban abortion after fetal heartbeat started. In 2019, several pro-life states, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee enacted forms of a heartbeat bill.
So far, none of these projects have been accepted, as the challenges of abortion advocacy groups have found support in federal courts of judges who argue that they conflict with existing abortion jurisprudence. Proponents of these laws believe that they can someday serve as a vehicle to challenge Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion decisions in the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, life advocates hope that debates over the heartbeat bill will bring public attention to the fact that the heartbeat of an unborn child begins and can be detected early in pregnancy. In fact, some of the most interesting conflicts in the abortion debate in recent years have arisen in response to bills on heartbeat, as opponents of legislation try to minimize the reality of fetal heartbeat.
In 2019, when several states enacted heartbeat bills, several major media outlets published articles insisting that the projects “misinterpret heartbeat science”. One abortionist insisted, as opposed to the heartbeat bills, that it is more technically correct to refer to the heartbeat in question as “fetal pole cardiac activity”.
Other media preferred the dehumanizing phrase “embryonic pulse”, dismissing the fetal heartbeat entirely on the advice of medical experts who pointed out that the fetus at this stage of pregnancy has “no type of cardiovascular system”.
While the bills are likely to continue to meet opposition in federal court, watching opponents trying to explain the reality of the unborn child as a distinct human being is a pro-life victory in itself.