COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s new all-male Supreme Courtroom 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 court docket’s personal resolution earlier this yr to strike down an identical legislation.
The continued erosion of legal abortion access across the U.S. South comes after Republican state lawmakers changed the lone feminine on the court docket, 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 mentioned the state legislature moderately decided this time round that these pursuits don’t outweigh “the curiosity of the unborn baby to reside.”
“As a Courtroom, until we are able to say that the stability 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 hanging down the ban. The court ruled then that the legislation violated the state structure’s proper to privateness.
Hearn then reached the court docket’s obligatory retirement age, enabling the Republican-dominated legislature to place Gary Hill on what’s now the nation’s only state Supreme Court with an entirely male bench.
With a newly configured Supreme Courtroom, Republican lawmakers enacted a brand new abortion legislation in 2023 that they thought would move 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 have in mind whether or not the abortion restrictions had been cheap 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 Courtroom final yr overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that supplied nationwide entry to abortion, most GOP-controlled states have enacted or adopted abortion bans of some type. All have been challenged in court docket.
