A South Carolina lawmaker is defending a bill he authored that could result in the death penalty for abortionists, despite co-sponsoring the legislation.
The proposal from Republican state Rep. Rob Harris seeks to amend South Carolina’s criminal code so that all references to “person” include a fertilized egg, embryo or fetus at any stage of development.
In effect, the bill would make abortion a crime — a crime punishable by death in South Carolina. It’s unclear how the law deals with discarding eggs or embryos, but the bill’s text repeatedly refers to “the moment of fertilization.”
The legislation, billed as the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023, is currently awaiting action by the state House Judiciary Committee. Even though the Supreme Court of the country has blocked another extreme abortion law, suggesting that this trial is facing an uphill battle, Harris tried to show just how far some “pro-life” politicians, empowered by the fall of Roe v. Wade, willing to go.
Asked to confirm whether he would impose the death penalty on people who abort pregnancies, Harris – a registered nurse who took office three months ago – sidestepped the issue.
“My bill is not just for women,” she wrote in an email to HuffPost. “It prohibits everyone from committing murder. It provides equal process to everyone under current law.
“We say to babies, ‘Your life is for me’, most of the time, because it’s convenient,” he said. (In fact, studies have found that the most common reason people seek abortions is the financial burden of having children.)
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The reality of the Harris bill is that a person convicted of murder for having or providing an abortion will be punished in extreme way. Anyone convicted of murder in South Carolina faces a minimum sentence of 30 years to life in prison. In certain circumstances – including when a child under the age of 11 is killed – the minimum sentence range increases to life in prison or the death penalty.
The bill, which allows for some exceptions, gained 23 co-sponsors in January and February — 20 men and all white. That’s despite South Carolina having one of the largest Black populations in the country – a demographic group with maternal mortality rate three times that of white.
But as anger over the proposed legislation has grown in recent weeks, the number of sponsors on the bill has dwindled. In an email to the 21 remaining co-sponsors of the legislation as of Monday morning, HuffPost asked lawmakers to confirm their support for punishing abortion patients with the death penalty.
“I don’t know if that’s included in this bill,” Republican state Rep. Randy Ligon — the only one to write back in 24 hours — responded. “I do not support the death penalty for women who terminate pregnancies. I do not support this part of the legislation.
In a subsequent email, Ligon said he had removed his name from the list of sponsors. By late Monday, the other four had quietly done so.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee — the branch of the Democratic Party dedicated to electing Democrats to state legislatures — slammed supporters of Harris’ legislation on Tuesday.
“Given the chance, this Republican lawmaker would kill a woman for exercising her reproductive freedom,” DLCC spokeswoman Gabrielle Chew said in a statement. “If it were up to the Republican Party, Americans would not be able to speak for themselves and reproductive freedom would be outlawed across the country. The GOP is rotten to the core, and too many lawmakers who hold these extreme views are in positions of power.