Attorneys general from 20 states, including Hawaii, challenge South Carolina abortion law

Democratic attorneys general from 20 states, including Hawaii, have voiced their support for a lawsuit challenging South Carolina’s new abortion law, arguing that the restrictive measure could harm their states by taxing resources if women cross borders to seek care.

“The effects of the law are not confined to limits on particular procedures in a single state: history shows that people will cross state lines to receive proper care,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, on behalf of the prosecutors, wrote in an amicus brief filed Wednesday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“As a result, South Carolina’s restrictive abortion laws will cause many of its citizens to seek abortion care in Amici States — potentially straining their healthcare systems.”

Signed into law by Republican Gov. Henry McMaster shortly after its passage earlier this year, the measure requires doctors to perform ultrasounds to check for a so-called “fetal heartbeat,” which can typically be detected about six weeks into pregnancy. If cardiac activity is detected, the abortion can only be performed if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, or if the mother’s life is in danger.

“South Carolina’s law is unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court precedent because it effectively bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy,” Hawaii Attorney General Clare Connors said. “By joining this amicus brief, we ask the courts to follow longstanding legal authority that prevents devastating health consequences for women.”

Medical experts say the cardiac activity is not an actual heartbeat but rather an initial flutter of electric activity within cells in an embryo. They say the heart doesn’t begin to form until the fetus it is at least nine weeks old, and they decry efforts to promote abortion bans by relying on medical inaccuracies.

Planned Parenthood attorneys sued immediately after McMaster signed the bill, and the entire law has been blocked from going into effect pending the outcome of a challenge to Mississippi’s new abortion law before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Earlier this month, the high court allowed a Texas law prohibiting abortions once medical professionals can detect cardiac activity to remain in force. The move — the nation’s biggest curb to abortion rights since the court announced in its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision — has been closely watched by a dozen states like South Carolina, which have enacted bans early in pregnancy that remain blocked by the courts.

Opponents have argued many women do not know they are pregnant at six weeks, especially if they are not trying to conceive. And, they argue, with such an early deadline, the law gives women little time to consider whether to have an abortion.

Laws like South Carolina’s, Herring wrote, “would create vast ‘abortion deserts’” and “harm healthcare overall by creating serious spillover effects that make it more difficult to obtain proper care for other needs, such as miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.”

The states — “many of whom support and subsidize a range of reproductive healthcare services — stand ready and willing to provide such services to those in need,” he added.

All but three of the attorneys general on Wednesday’s filing also come from states with Democratic governors. In addition to the District of Columbia and Hawaii, the states that signed onto the brief are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

In July, 20 mostly Republican-led states went on record in support of South Carolina’s law, arguing in an amicus brief that a federal judge was wrong to pause the entire measure instead of just the provision being challenged. That ruling, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall argued, “treads on South Carolina’s sovereign ability to decide for itself the purposes of its legislation” and “aggrandizes the judicial power by treating the court’s injunction of the challenged provision as erasing it entirely so the whole Act collapses.”