A South Carolina Republican’s sad awakening on abortion

They know not what they do.

I know it’s dangerous to quote Jesus in reference to abortion, given that the Bible has been used as a cudgel against those who believe government should not have final say over a pregnant woman’s body. Nevertheless, it’s what came to mind when I was watching testimony by S.C. State Rep. Neal Collins during a House Judiciary Committee about whether South Carolina should adopt even more barbaric abortion laws.

Collins recited a long list of statistics about the poor state of things for women and children in South Carolina, things he should have known long ago. The state has the eighth-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation, with black women dying at three times the rate of white women. It is the worst state in which to have a baby, and second-worst for women’s economic and social well-being. The state is ranked the seventh-worst place to raise a family, in part because South Carolina has the 44th ranked health care system, Collins pointed out, among many other sobering realities.

For those paying attention, those numbers are not surprising though depressing. It’s what we’ve been screaming about for years, decades. And yet much of the General Assembly, overwhelming led by Republicans, has done little to change those conditions, often falling back on superficial rhetoric about not taxing success while finding new ways to lower taxes on the wealthy. That’s not just a legislative scandal, but a moral one. The people repeatedly sent to Columbia in one of the poorest states in the nation have routinely either locked the poor into poverty or refused to take necessary steps to elevate them out.

Collins’s testimony hit home because he should have known. Did he not know the state of things before he voted to approve an abortion law that would place another burden on the backs of poor-pregnant women? How could he not know that extremist abortion laws would make emotional-complex pregnancy decisions even harder to bear? How did he not know that a 19-year-old woman would be denied an abortion for an unviable fetus because of a law he supported, a law that went into effect just a couple months ago after the Supreme Court stripped 50 years of reproductive health protections from American women?

“First, she’s going to pass this fetus in the toilet. She’s going to have to deal with that on her own. There’s a 50-percent chance — greater than 50-percent chance that she’s going to lose her uterus,” Collins testified. “There’s a 10-percent chance that she will develop sepsis and herself die. That weighs on me. I voted for that bill and we’re having a meeting on this…. That whole week I did not sleep.”

How did he not know?

Because in South Carolina, we weren’t supposed to know. We weren’t supposed to consider abortion as health care, only as murder, as an affront to God. To declare ourselves anything other than “pro-life” was to risk being shunned in church and at the Friday night football game and at the local Walmart. Good God-fearing people are “pro-life” and hate abortion. Bad people, you see, are those who think such during the 40-week gestation period, such gut-wrenching decisions should be left up to women rather than turning their bodies over to legislators who don’t realize what’s at stake for women they know – and so many they don’t.

I hate that it took the telling of a personal story to make Collins aware of the dangers of these laws. But at least he was willing to listen. Too bad the men, other Republican legislators, who approved of even more-stringent abortion laws, weren’t.

This story was originally published August 25, 2022 at 1:03 PM with the headline "A South Carolina Republican’s sad awakening on abortion."