The South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the state’s six-week ban on abortion after finding that the “state constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman’s decision to have an abortion.”
The 3-2 ruling came in response to a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, Greenville Women’s Clinic, and two individual providers that was filed last July. The plaintiffs argued that the law, which banned abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — with exceptions for fetal anomalies, risk to the life of the mother, and some cases of rape or incest – was in violation of the state’s constitution.
The state’s high court first temporarily blocked the law from being enforced in August.
Justice Kaye Hearn wrote Thursday that the state may impose some limits on the right to privacy but “any such limitation must be reasonable and it must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy.”
The court ruled that six weeks is “quite simply, not a reasonable period of time for those two things to occur.”
The ruling allows abortion to remain legal in the Palmetto State until 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“Our decision today is neither ‘pro-choice’ nor ‘pro-life’; it merely recognizes that our state constitution grants every South Carolinian a right to privacy, equal protection, and due process of laws,” Chief Justice Donald Beatty, the court’s lone Democrat, wrote in a concurring opinion. “This fundamental, constitutional mandate transcends politics and opinion.”
The state’s privacy clause enshrines the right to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures and unreasonable invasions of privacy shall not be violated.”
Attorneys for the state argued during oral arguments in October that the privacy clause did not extend to abortion.
“At the end of the day, my friends on the other side, the petitioners, bear the burden to show that privacy falls within this language, and they can’t do that,” said Grayson Lambert, senior counsel for South Carolina governor Henry McMaster.
Justice John Kittredge wrote in a dissenting opinion that he “would honor the policy decision made by the General Assembly.”
“Abortion presents an important moral and policy issue. The citizens, through their duly elected representatives, have spoken. The South Carolina legislature, not this court, should determine matters of policy,” Kittredge added.
McMaster decried the ruling on Thursday, saying the court “has found a right in our Constitution which was never intended by the people of South Carolina.”
“With this opinion, the court has clearly exceeded its authority. The people have spoken through their elected representatives multiple times on this issue. I look forward to working with the General Assembly to correct this error,” he said in a statement.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre celebrated the ruling in a tweet, saying the Biden administration is “encouraged by South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruling today on the state’s extreme and dangerous abortion ban.”