On Thursday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed into law a bill limiting elective abortions to the first six weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions thereafter in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal-health condition, and to protect the life and physical health of the mother.
That makes South Carolina the 23rd state to have a law generally protecting the lives of unborn children who have detectable heartbeats.
With South Carolina’s law, and the passage of twelve-week limits in Nebraska and North Carolina, half of all states now have laws that generally ban abortion beyond the first trimester of pregnancy.
But having a law limiting abortion on the books isn’t the same thing as having it in effect: Courts have blocked bans in several of those states, including South Carolina on Friday. (A January state-supreme-court ruling struck down an earlier heartbeat law in South Carolina, but changes in the legislation and one change in membership to the court means that the new law will likely be upheld.)
Late-term elective abortion remains very much legal in many places in the United States:
Ten years ago this month, Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted on three counts of murder for killing infants with a pair of scissors moments after they had been born.
In addition to the murder convictions for what Gosnell described as “snippings” and his assistant more accurately called “beheadings,” Gosnell was also convicted on 21 counts of killing babies in utero later than 24 weeks of pregnancy, the legal abortion limit established under Pennsylvania’s 1982 Abortion Control Act.
The state of Colorado, however, has no legal limit on abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, and Dr. Warren Hern, the subject of a new profile in the Atlantic, has acted with impunity over the last 50 years as he killed, and still kills, infants in utero via lethal injection.
Infants born as early as 21 weeks to 22 weeks of pregnancy have survived their stays in the neonatal intensive care unit and grow up to be healthy children. But Hern makes a living by killing preemies “who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along,” according to the Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey. Most of the time, these babies and their mothers are physically healthy: “Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses.”