Last Call For The Road To Gilead Goes Through South Carolina

After Republicans replaced the only woman on South Carolina's state Supreme Court who blocked the state's "fetal heartbeat" abortion ban earlier this year, a 4-1 decision from the now all-male panel has stripped the right of bodily autonomy from the state's women.

 

South Carolina’s new all-male Supreme Court reversed course on abortion on Wednesday, upholding a ban on most such procedures after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The 4-1 ruling departs from the court’s own decision earlier this year to strike down a similar law.

The continued erosion of legal abortion access across the U.S. South comes after Republican state lawmakers replaced the lone female on the court, Justice Kaye Hearn.

Writing for the new majority, Justice John Kittredge acknowledged that the 2023 law infringes on “a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” but said the state legislature reasonably determined this time around that those interests don’t outweigh “the interest of the unborn child to live.”

“As a Court, unless we can say that the balance struck by the legislature was unreasonable as a matter of law, we must uphold the Act,” Kittredge wrote.

It was Hearn who wrote the majority’s lead opinion in January striking down the ban. The court ruled then that the law violated the state constitution’s right to privacy.

Hearn then reached the court’s mandatory retirement age, enabling the Republican-dominated legislature to put Gary Hill on what is now the nation’s only state Supreme Court with an entirely male bench.

 

And yet plenty of women will continue to vote for Republicans in SC and plenty of other red states, and just accept that all women need to be second-class citizen to the axolotl tank imperative in order to keep all the crabs in the bucket, and none can escape.

Increasingly, your rights depend on where you live in America, and solely so in some cases. That's not justice or fairness, it's tyranny.