Editor’s Note: Those who want to track the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act and similar legislation filed across the country should follow the Foundation to Abolish Abortion.
South Carolina lawmakers filed a bill that would establish equal protection of the laws for preborn babies to recognize “the sanctity of innocent human life created in the image of God.”
The bill prefiled last week, named the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act, notes that the South Carolina Constitution and the United States Constitution make clear that the “equal protection of the laws” cannot be denied to any person. The legislation would therefore “protect the lives of preborn persons with the same criminal and civil laws protecting the lives of born persons” by removing current state laws “that enable the commission of wilful prenatal homicide and assault.”
South Carolina Republican State Representative Rob Harris, who filed the bill alongside five coauthors, warned in a release that “the issue of abortion is far from settled in South Carolina” since there are “zero restrictions on abortion up to around six weeks,” while the practice of “self-managed abortion” conducted by a woman “remains legal throughout pregnancy.”
“Equal protection is the only way to legally end abortion and build a culture of life in South Carolina,” Harris remarked in the release. “By protecting babies in the womb with the same laws that protect the lives of born people, we are simply loving our preborn neighbors as ourselves.”
The legislation would indeed overturn laws that disallow the prosecution of mothers who willfully obtain abortions, yet clarifies that any mother can defend herself from prosecution by demonstrating that she was compelled to have an abortion under “the threat of imminent death or great bodily injury.” The bill likewise establishes that enforcement of the provisions would be subject to the preexisting “presumptions, defenses, justifications, laws of parties, immunities, and clemencies as would apply to the homicide of a person who had been born alive.”
The bill was prefiled on the same day as the South Carolina Human Life Protection Act, which would ban the administration of abortion pills and other abortion drugs to pregnant women by third parties, but supporters of the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act warned that the legislation fails to meaningfully limit abortion by keeping self-managed abortion legal for women.
The lawmakers across the country who attempt to close loopholes allowing mothers to willfully murder their babies have been opposed by establishment Republicans. Harris and others nevertheless interpret the most recent primary elections in South Carolina as a blow to establishment Republicans who they believe are disconnected from conservative policy priorities.
Harris added that civil magistrates “have a mandate from God to end abortion,” mourning that tens of thousands of babies are “being taken away to death” in South Carolina, and calling on his colleagues to obey God by “ending the genocide of abortion in our state once and for all.”
