COLUMBIA, S.C. — A legislative effort to further restrict abortions in South Carolina has died for the year after Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate failed to reach a compromise in time.
On Wednesday, a day after the midterm elections, the state Senate rejected a restrictive abortion proposal that would have banned the procedure at conception without an exception should the fetus have a fatal anomaly.
The 23-21 vote came as no surprise after the Senate’s Republican leader explained, repeatedly, for weeks that the 46-member upper chamber lacked the votes necessary to pass a near-total ban on abortion.
Seven of the 23 who voted to table, or kill, the proposal were Republicans, three of whom were women.
“It was pretty clear to me that the Senate did not have the votes to pass something like this,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said on the Senate floor Wednesday following a meeting with House negotiators. “There were folks who didn’t believe me.”
The vote means the debate is dead for the year, after multiple hearings and rounds of voting by both chambers.
The legislative special session ends Sunday, and the House said it would only return to Columbia if the Senate approved the conference report on the abortion bill, which senators did not.
“I agree that the bill is dead,” House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, told reporters after the vote.
The Senate’s arguably most vocal anti-abortion member, Sen. Richard Cash, criticized his Republican colleagues for calling themselves “pro-life,” only to vote with Democrats to kill his proposal, which made up the final report on H. 5399.
“I would challenge you (that) you don’t really believe what you say,” the Anderson Republican said on the floor Wednesday.
After the vote, Cash declined to answer when asked whether, knowing that a near-total ban would fail, he would have supported a more narrow, tighter six-week law.
Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who won reelection Tuesday to a second four-year term and whose public remarks on abortion restrictions softened over the course of his campaign, told The State newspaper Wednesday he suggests that legislators ultimately agree on a bill that most South Carolinians can support.
“And not to be radical, but produce a bill, if they produce one, that will be acceptable, that the majority of the people in the state will be comfortable with,” McMaster said. “All legislation ought to meet that test.”
Similar to other legislatures across the country, the Republican-controlled South Carolina General Assembly returned for a special session this fall to respond to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade, thus empowering states to pass stricter abortion bans.
But neither chamber, mainly Republicans, were ever able to agree on how restrictive the South Carolina ban should be.
The original House version of the bill would have banned abortions at conception but included exceptions for rape, incest and the mother’s life. The Senate version, meanwhile, would have narrowed the state’s existing six-week law by tightening the window in cases of rape and incest to the first trimester, or 12 weeks, and included an exception for the mother’s life and fatal fetal anomaly, the latter requiring two doctors to sign off.
South Carolina’s six-week law, which bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, is currently blocked by the state Supreme Court as it decides whether the law violates the state’s constitutional right to privacy.
Senators said their version of the bill would have ultimately fixed what led to the injunction.
With the law’s suspension, abortions are currently allowed up to the state’s previous ban threshold, at roughly 20 weeks.
“I know there are people who are disappointed on both sides, but I’ll tell you that when we came in in September, personally, I thought that we had a shot at a ban at conception, as long as the exceptions were in there. I knew it was real close, I knew it was real close. And it was real close,” Massey said, tearing into the House decision back in September to reject the Senate version of the bill by calling it a “very not smart” move.
“You’ve got amateurs over there (in the House) playing legislative strategy, and they don’t know what they’re doing,” Massey said after senators, following the vote Wednesday, returned to the negotiation table.
But by that point, none of the House negotiators were present.
The meeting of the senators and absence of the House members was described by some on either side as politically symbolic and a power move more than anything.
Massey’s remarks and the meeting capped what had been months of contentious hearings, a flurry of votes and legislators pointing the finger at who was to blame, while Democrats mostly sat aside.
House Speaker Smith — who was elected speaker in April amid a leadership turnover in an increasingly Republican-controlled chamber that has split into factions, including over abortion — told reporters he agreed with Massey that it was “amateur hour,” but not among House members.
He called the Senate version of the bill, a more narrow six-week ban, a “smoke screen.”
“You come to an agreement, you sign the report and then you go vote against it? That’s just bizarre,” Smith said.
Anti-abortion legislators have vowed next session in January they’ll return pushing the debate again.
Though a strict bill could pass the House again given that the lower chamber added even more Republican legislators to its roster, growing to a supermajority, the Senate is not up for reelection until 2024.
“I see the ball in the Senate’s court,” Smith said. “If any abortion bill is going to become law, it’s going to have to get the support of the Senate, and so the ball’s in the Senate court.”
Staff reporter Joseph Bustos contributed to this report.
_____
