When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the fifty individual states became responsible for their own legislation regarding abortion. South Carolina, at that time, allowed abortions for 20 weeks. Lawmakers quickly began working to pass stricter legislation resulting in South Carolina’s current “Heartbeat Bill,” which has been in effect in since August 2023. This puts our state in the second tier of most restrictive states for abortion.
For many of the most conservative Republicans, however, the Heartbeat Bill is not restrictive enough. There is currently a bill in the SC Senate, S.323: “The Unborn Child Protection Act”, which provides for an almost total ban on abortion, including harsh criminal penalties for those involved in any abortion. Billy Garrett, who represents the largest part of Saluda, was a co-sponsor of this bill.
Abortion is a very sensitive issue for almost everyone with an opinion, but no one should make judgments on S.323 based on headlines. On October 1, there was a hearing before the Senate Medical Affairs Committee. Any citizen who desired to speak about this bill was able to sign up to speak on the bill, and it was a very long list. In fact the entire hearing lasted just over 9 hours.
Our plan was to select representative video clips from this hearing for our Saluda voters to consider, but almost every witness had a compelling point to make. Therefore, we are providing the entire video here.
Obviously, no one has 9 hours to spend watching it, but it can be paused and restarted so that anyone can watch it a little at a time.
If you want to understand all the intricacies of this important bill, please watch as much of this video as you can. The text of the bill appears after the video.
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