South Carolina’s Push for the Country’s Most Extreme Abortion Ban Just Got Nuked in Committee

On Tuesday, South Carolina’s Senate Medical Affairs all-male subcommittee declined to advance Senate Bill 323, a disgusting pile of legislation that would have enacted the country’s most extreme abortion ban yet. It had the starter pack of things a bill needs to fail: it was deeply unpopular, extremely horrible, and, speaking to Mother Jones, one policy specialist called it “a Frankenstein construction of all the worst possible restrictions from around the country.” 

“These lawmakers wanted to throw people in prison and force extreme harms onto people in emergency pregnancy situations rather than let them have abortions,” Nimra Chowdhry, Senior State Legislative Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement to Jezebel. “No one deserves to be treated like a criminal for getting or even talking about health care.”

SB 323 sought to amend the state’s “Unborn Child Protection Act” by eliminating exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and fetal defects; criminalizing abortions as homicide; and threatening anyone who terminates their pregnancy (or any “accomplice,” like a doctor or physician) with up to 30 years in prison. It would have required a 10-year-old raped by a family member to carry their child to term while also curtailing doctors from treating complications during pregnancy. It was so draconian it bothered pro-abortion and anti-abortion groups alike, the latter of whom were disturbed by the idea of outrightly prosecuting women for having an abortion.

On Tuesday, lawmakers tried twice to revise the bill to make it less evil. But Sen. Richard Cash (an absolute freak who introduced the bill in February, and who once compared the fight against abortion rights to the fight against abolishing slavery) fought to keep everything in—which caused four Republicans to bow out from voting to advance it, and thus allowed Dems to tank it in a 2-3 vote. (The committee’s makeup consists of six GOP legislators and three Dems.)

“What I’m interested in is speaking on behalf of South Carolinians, and they’re not interested in this bill right now,” Sen. Jeff Zell, one of the four GOP abstentions, told AP News after the vote. “Say what you want, play your politics. I’m not interested in that.” (As of 2023, nearly two-thirds of South Carolinians supported the right to abortion and opposed a statewide ban.)

“South Carolinians have no interest in being criminalized for basic healthcare nor abortion access,” Camille A., a staff member at Carolina Abortion Fund, added in a statement to Jezebel. “What South Carolinians actually want is to be able to afford to eat, to feed their families, and to be able to trust the healthcare team that they have chosen to walk through each and every healthcare journey they may face.”

In October, the Senate opened the floor up to the public to debate the bill, and more than 300 people showed up to deliver remarks on it. (We listened in on the hearing, and for the most part, the people “for” it were clergynuts who kept citing random passages from the Bible; and those “against” were doctors, clinicians, and mothers.) And while the failure of SB 323 is undeniably good, South Carolina is still home to one of the strictest bans in the country. But I suppose things staying bad (and not getting worse) is the best we can hope for at this point.

Since the start of 2025, at least 10 states (including the Palmetto State) have tried to introduce legislation that would punish abortion as murder. Unfortunately, while the subcommittee struck down SB 323, there are still other ways to get the bill to the Senate floor, but for now, it’s done.

“This is an enormous victory for reproductive freedom and for the people of South Carolina,” Dr. Amalia Luxardo, CEO of the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network, told Jezebel. “Today’s decision affirms what we already know: when our communities take action, we can protect our rights and influence the direction of our state.”

---