South Carolina Looks at Most Restrictive Abortion Bill in the US as Opponents Keep Pushing Limits

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

47% : Current law blocks abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is typically six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
43% : These are the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation being considered by South Carolina lawmakers, even as opponents of the procedure are divided over how far to go.
41% : Women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them could face up to 30 years in prison.
38% : Three of them unseated the Senate's only Republican women, a trio who called themselves the Sister Senators after helping block a stricter abortion ban after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
38% : Republican Sen. Richard Cash, who sponsors the bill and is one of the Senate's most strident voices against abortion, will run Tuesday's subcommittee.
36% : Sending women who get abortions to prison for decades.
35% : As the nation's social and political discussions lurch to the right, with debates over whether same-sex marriage should be made illegal again or whether women should work outside the home, Ziegler said it has become easier to push for restrictions that might have never been brought before legislatures before.
34% : But the measure up for a second hearing Tuesday would go further than any considered since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, as abortion remains an unsettled issue in conservative states.
34% : What's in the bill The proposal would ban all abortions unless the woman's life is at risk and eliminates exceptions for rape and incest victims up to 12 weeks.
30% : South Carolina Citizens for Life, one of the state's largest and oldest opponents of abortion, issued a statement the day of last month's hearing saying it can't support the bill because women who get abortions are victims too and shouldn't be punished.
29% : Abortion opponents are split over punishing women The proposal has even split groups that oppose abortion and once celebrated together when South Carolina passed the six-week ban in 2021, a trigger law set to take effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned.
24% : Providing information about abortions would be illegal, leaving doctors worried they couldn't suggest legal abortion elsewhere.
13% : "Abortion is murder and should be treated as such," the group's founder Mark Corral said. Messaging of the past keeps abortion opponents apart Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who has written extensively about abortion, said the divide stems from longstanding messaging that labeled abortion murder while avoiding punishment of women.

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