COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s new all-male Supreme Court docket reversed course on abortion on Wednesday, upholding a ban on most such procedures after about six weeks of being pregnant.
The 4-1 ruling departs from the courtroom’s personal choice earlier this 12 months to strike down the same legislation.
The continued erosion of authorized abortion entry throughout the U.S. South comes after Republican state lawmakers changed the lone feminine on the courtroom, Justice Kaye Hearn.
Writing for the brand new majority, Justice John Kittredge acknowledged that the 2023 legislation infringes on “a girl’s proper of privateness and bodily autonomy,” however stated the state legislature moderately decided this time round that these pursuits don’t outweigh “the curiosity of the unborn youngster to dwell.”
“As a Court docket, until we will say that the steadiness struck by the legislature was unreasonable as a matter of legislation, we should uphold the Act,” Kittredge wrote.
It was Hearn who wrote the bulk’s lead opinion in January putting down the ban. The courtroom dominated then that the legislation violated the state structure’s proper to privateness.
Hearn then reached the courtroom’s obligatory retirement age, enabling the Republican-dominated legislature to place Gary Hill on what’s now the nation’s solely state Supreme Court docket with a completely male bench.
With a newly configured Supreme Court docket, Republican lawmakers enacted a brand new abortion legislation in 2023 that they thought would go muster a second time round. Particularly, the legislation was crafted to handle Justice John Few’s concern, expressed within the January ruling, that lawmakers did not consider whether or not the abortion restrictions had been affordable sufficient to infringe upon privateness rights in favor of the precise to life.
Abortion suppliers, together with Deliberate Parenthood South Atlantic, sued once more.
Hill joined Wednesday’s majority together with Few, who had beforehand voted to overturn the 2021 legislation.
For the reason that U.S. Supreme Court docket final 12 months overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that offered nationwide entry to abortion, most GOP-controlled states have enacted or adopted abortion bans of some sort. All have been challenged in courtroom.