Two red-state abortion bans fail
The conservative rush to turn post-Roe v. Wade United States into Gilead hit a couple of speed bumps on Thursday. The civil war against women halted first in South Carolina (of all places) and again in Nebraska hours later.
In lengthy and often impassioned speeches on the South Carolina Senate floor, the state’s five female senators — three Republicans and two Democrats — decried what would have been a near-total ban on abortion. One, Sen. Sandy Senn (R), likened the implications to the dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which women are treated as property of the state.
Senn seems almost peeved about that. She said abortion laws “have always been, each and every one of them, about control — plain and simple. And in the Senate, the males have all the control.”
South Carolina and Nebraska currently allow abortions for up to about 22 weeks.
Nebraska’s bill that would have banned most all abortions after 6 weeks faltered for lack of a single vote when two senators did not vote:
Merv Riepe, a longtime Republican who would have been the decisive vote to advance the bill to a final round of voting, abstained over his concern that the six-week ban might not give women enough time to know they are pregnant.
Riepe told the Flatwater Free Press that he was concerned the Nebraska bill would be viewed as a total ban. “At the end of the day, I need to look back and be able to say to myself, ‘Did you do the best?’” Riepe told the paper. “No group came to me, asking me to do this. This is of my own beliefs, my own commitments.”
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) seemed almost peeved that. He said it was “unacceptable for senators to be present not voting on such a momentous vote.”
What’s going on here? The 2024 elections may be 18 months away, but the growing fury of women over the Supreme Court’s unpopular 2022 decision overturning Roe is weighing on Republican minds. Especially after the party’s epic poor showing in the 2022 midterms.
Neighboring Kansas voters’ August 2022 rejection of a constitutional amendment stripping abortion protections there may have given a few Nebraska legislators pause to reconsider how Gilead they were prepared to go.
Your misogyny is showing
The five women in the South Carolina state Senate did not have to read between the lines:
“The total ban that’s being debated here today clearly places the rights of a fetus over the rights of the women and girls who will be forced by our male-dominated legislature to carry that fetus to term,” said Sen. Mia McLeod. “To be blunt, the majority has no frame of reference. There’s only five of us in this body who have actually given birth.”
“If this bill passes, a baby will be forced to carry and deliver another baby, even if it costs her her life,” added McLeod, an independent.
As other southern states have enacted near-total bans, South Carolina has become a destination for women seeking abortions, notes the New York Times:
Both states would have joined a growing list of Republican-dominated states with severe restrictions on abortion. So far, 14 states have active bans on nearly all abortions, though some allow exceptions for rape and danger to the life of the mother. Georgia and Florida also ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, but Florida’s ban is on hold pending a court challenge.
The state’s Supreme Court ruled in January that South Carolina’s constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy extends to abortion. The 3-2 majority wrote that “the decision to terminate a pregnancy rests upon the utmost personal and private considerations imaginable,” but the state retained an “interest in protecting unborn life.”
South Carolina could still pass a ban in the remaining six weeks of its session.
It remains unclear whether the legislative failures conservatives encountered in South Carolina and Nebraska represent speed bumps rather than attacks of conscience, or reassessments of how the GOP’s rush to Gilead will land with voters in 2024.
Riepe, a former hospital administrator, addressed colleagues after an amendment he offered failed. It would have moved the Nebraska ban out to 12 weeks.
The Associated Press reports, “Riepe took to the mic to warn his conservative colleagues that they should heed signs that abortion will galvanize women to vote them out of office.”
They might not lose sleep over their attitudes toward women, but they might over women’s attitudes toward them.