Lawsuit seeks to set SC's abortion ban at 9 weeks, not 6
COLUMBIA — The latest challenge to South Carolina’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban asks the court to declare nine weeks as the cutoff, giving women three additional weeks to end a pregnancy.
The lawsuit filed Monday by Planned Parenthood in Richland County comes three months after the state Supreme Court refused to directly take abortion providers’ case questioning when in a pregnancy the ban takes effect.
It is filed on behalf of a South Carolina woman who was unable to schedule an abortion in her home state before her sixth week of pregnancy, causing her to make three trips to North Carolina to get an abortion there.
Officially, the law upheld by the state Supreme Court last year bans abortion once an ultrasound detects the sound of cardiac activity. Such a sound can be heard at roughly the sixth week of pregnancy, which is why the law has consistently been called a six-week ban. But what’s heard at that point is not a heart in a fetus, but rather electrical impulses in a developing embryo, say abortion providers who argue the law’s vague wording could be interpreted as prohibiting abortions at two different points in a pregnancy.
https://scdailygazette.com/2024/02/05/lawsuit-seeks-to-set-scs-abortion-ban-at-9-weeks-not-6/