Imagine an abortion ban so radical that even leading anti-abortion groups have lined up to denounce it. That’s what abortion “abolitionists” are hoping eventually to unleash on South Carolina, with a key legislative hearing scheduled for Tuesday.
Senate Bill 323, also known as the Unborn Child Protection Act, may be the most draconian abortion legislation to advance in the post–Roe v. Wade era. The bill would equate abortion with homicide and allow patients to be prosecuted with sentences of up to 30 years in prison—a first in the country. It would repeal existing exceptions for victims of rape or incest as well as for pregnancies involving fatal fetal diagnoses. It would eliminate the judicial bypass mechanism for minors to seek abortions without parental permission and make it a crime to help a teenager travel out of state for abortion care.
“It’s like a Frankenstein construction of all the worst possible restrictions from around the country,” said Rosann Mariappuram, senior policy counsel for reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive think tank. “They’re throwing every extreme idea out there into the mix.”
The bill also takes aim at contraceptives, defining “human embryo” as a fertilized egg or zygote and redefining “contraceptive” to exclude anything that prevents ovulation or implantation of an embryo—in other words, hormonal birth control such as the Pill and IUDs. Many abortion opponents claim—incorrectly—that hormonal contraception is an abortifacient, and the new definitions could threaten the future of birth control and in vitro fertilization in the state.
Abortion is already prohibited in South Carolina after a fetal heartbeat is detectable, around six weeks of pregnancy. But the existing law, passed in 2023, specifically exempts patients from being criminally charged if they violate the ban. Instead, it targets medical providers with punishment. That’s in line with the longstanding position of the mainstream abortion movement, which frames women as the “second victims” who must be “protected” from abortion “profiteers.”
In contrast, S.323 adopts the position of far-right abolitionists who believe that life begins at fertilization and that abortion should be criminalized for all parties involved. Under the bill, mere possession of any abortion-causing medication would be illegal. So would sharing information about how to get an abortion—via a website, for instance, or a telephone hotline. Anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers”—which provide free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to pregnant patients in hopes of dissuading them from getting abortions—could be forced to snitch on women who decided to terminate their pregnancies anyway.
“The cruelty of this bill cannot be overstated. It creates a web of surveillance, punishment, and fear that will ensnare families, friends, doctors, and communities.”
Doctors would also face increased penalties of up to 30 years behind bars. People who help women get abortions could be sued for wrongful death.
“The cruelty of this bill cannot be overstated,” Amalia Luxardo, CEO of the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network, a statewide advocacy group, wrote in a recent op-ed. “It creates a web of surveillance, punishment, and fear that will ensnare families, friends, doctors, and communities.” WREN is among the groups converging in the state capital on Tuesday as the Senate Medical Affairs subcommittee holds a second hearing on the bill. The first one in October lasted more than eight hours and drew testimony from scores of people. This time, no public comments will be allowed, and attendees will only be able to watch the proceedings from a separate room.
“We are strongly urging lawmakers to stop this bill from moving forward,” Luxardo said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Based on what we see on the ground, this bill is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of South Carolinians. People want access to reproductive healthcare, not more bans, more criminalization, or more government intrusion.”
Meanwhile, even mainstream anti-abortion groups have expressed concern about two S.323 provisions in particular: the idea that abortion patients could be prosecuted, and that crisis pregnancy center workers could be forced to give evidence against their own clients who may have chosen to terminate their pregnancies. “Pro-lifers understand better than anyone else the desire to punish the purveyors of abortion who act callously and without regard to the dignity of human life,” Lisa Van Riper, president of South Carolina Citizens for Life, said in a statement before the first hearing. “But turning women who have abortions into criminals… is not the way.”
“Pregnancy help organizations cannot both openly advocate for criminalizing women and remain safe harbors for them,” Heartbeat International, the largest federation of crisis pregnancy centers in the world, said in a statement. “The call to criminalize women for abortion, however well-intentioned, directly conflicts with the heart of pregnancy help.”
That’s not to say, however, that anti-abortion groups oppose making South Carolina’s existing abortion laws tougher. Kristan Hawkins, president of the influential Students for Life of America, sent a letter to lawmakers suggesting that instead of S.323, they throw their support behind a different piece of legislation introduced this past January, the Human Life Protection Act, which would replace the six-week ban with a near-total one. “To restore a culture of Life in South Carolina, women must feel protected and supported,” Hawkins said in her letter. The less extreme bill “keeps the focus of the enforcement on those predators who engage in a business of ending innocent life for profit.”
After the October hearing, S.323’s main sponsor, state Senator Richard Cash, one of the legislature’s most strident abortion opponents, acknowledged that the bill wasn’t perfect. But in an interview with a South Carolina TV station, he mostly defended S.323, arguing that it “helps women in South Carolina because, if a woman is going to intentionally kill her unborn child, she knows intuitively that’s the wrong thing to do.” He defended criminalizing anyone who helps a patient get an abortion: “It’s no different than conspiring to kill a born human being.” He also doubled down on targeting websites, claiming that a site that provides information about abortion is the same as “a website to find a killer to rub your wife out, to rub your husband out, to rub your child out.”
The bill’s main sponsor defended criminalizing anyone who helps a patient get an abortion: “It’s no different than conspiring to kill a born human being.”
Abortion abolitionists have backed Cash’s bill while also complaining it doesn’t go far enough. “Senate Bill 323 still falls short of equal protection,” the Foundation to Abolish Abortion said in a legislative analysis on its website. “The prison sentences prescribed by the bill are weaker than existing penalties in South Carolina for the murder of born people.” In other words, the death penalty.
As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote earlier this year, the once-fringe abolitionist movement—dominated by militant Christian men, including a group that has become known as “TheoBros”—has been on the rise since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022:
The most effective arenas for abortion abolitionists are at the state level; in at least 17 states, they have worked with lawmakers to introduce bills that would treat abortion as homicide, according to the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates. In 2023, the Colorado Times Recorder reported that abolitionist groups were urging supporters to run for local office. “You need one of them to carry this [abortion abolition resolution] because they’ve got to introduce it, or you can run for that and become part of your County Republican executive committee,” the Foundation to Abolish Abortion’s [Bradley] Pierce said at a 2023 rally in Kansas.
Certainly, the anti-abortion culture of South Carolina runs deep, and criminalizing pregnant women is far from new. In 1997, the state Supreme Court became the first in the country to rule that a viable fetus was a child under state law and that drug-using pregnant women could be charged with child neglect. Around the same time, a public hospital in Charleston was discovered to be drug testing pregnant patients involuntarily and turning them over to law enforcement, earning a rebuke from the US Supreme Court. Even without S.323, police and prosecutors have used other existing laws to punish women for pregnancy losses.
Still, WREN’s Luxardo said, “communities across the state are exhausted by political attacks on healthcare, and they want lawmakers to focus on policies that support families, not harm them,” S.323 is “unworkable and dangerous in any form,” she added, singling out the provisions targeting speech and information-sharing as especially alarming. “There is no version of this bill that protects people’s health, rights, or safety.”
Even if, as many expect, S.323 is amended to drop or soften some provisions, the legislation still normalizes ideas that Mariappuram called “radical in the worst sense of the word.”
“A lot of times, [abortion opponents] use big bills like this as a test case to see what is going to kind of get through the door,” she said. “And then the next year, or even six months later, you see multiple other states introduce copycat versions of the pieces that seem like they’ll survive.” At Tuesday’s hearing, Mariappuram added, “a really bad thing to watch out for is amendments to make the bill seem more palatable . . . so they can try to make the argument that they fixed it.”
Abortion rights activists are worried about what the Senate might do if S.323 advances, given the results of the 2024 elections. The only three GOP women in the chamber—the so-called “sister senators” who stopped an earlier total abortion ban—were ousted and replaced by Republican men.
But a Senate leader told ABC News that, even with a Republican supermajority, if S.323 passes out of the subcommittee, there is no guarantee that it will advance further.
“I can say this definitively,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said, “there has been not only no decision made to bring up that bill, there’s been no discussion about bringing up that bill.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.