Nearly seven weeks passed between Jill Hartle learning that she was losing her first pregnancy and her receiving abortion care in Washington, D.C.
Every day between July and September 2022, the South Carolina native had to pass Charleston’s Planned Parenthood Clinic and the crowd of anti-abortion protesters gathered before it as she drove to her hair studio. Every two hours, she had to respond to excitement from clients at the sight of her pregnant belly with the revelation that her child wasn’t going to make it and that she would soon travel out of state to terminate the pregnancy. Every time, she had to watch their faces drop as they realized she was obtaining an abortion.
“Walking through the world visibly pregnant, knowing that your child is not going to survive, is one of the most horrific things that a woman could ever have to do,” said Hartle, who learned at 18 weeks pregnant that her child, whom she named Ivy Grace, had been diagnosed with a severe congenital heart defect. “Then to be forced to do it — it’s unfathomable.”
Lawmakers in South Carolina are considering a bill that would repeal protections under the state’s six-week abortion ban, eliminating existing exceptions and further criminalizing efforts to help a pregnant person obtain an abortion. Senate Bill 323 is the second bill introduced in the state legislature this year that would classify a fetus as a human being from fertilization, effectively categorizing abortion as homicide. People like Hartle who have had to flee South Carolina to access abortion care warn that the bill would put more lives at risk — and embolden lawmakers in other states.
“Women will die because of this,” Hartle told Salon.
SB 323 would ban all abortions in the state except for those performed in medical emergencies or to prevent a pregnant person from suffering death or major, irreversible harm. It strikes exceptions for rape, incest and fatal fetal anomaly diagnoses, while redefining “contraceptive” as a “drug, device or chemical that prevents conception.”
The bill also bars minors from being taken out of state to obtain an abortion and other people, including providers, from providing any patient with information about and resources on how to access abortion care. Such an act would be considered a felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison and open those people up to civil action brought by the attorney general, the father of the fetus or its grandparents.
Beyond restricting access to abortion care, the bill would also classify embryos as human beings, jeopardizing the IVF process with the threat of prosecution should it go awry, and allow the pregnant patient to be prosecuted for obtaining an abortion.
Primary bill sponsors and Republican Sens. Richard Cash and Rex Rice did not respond to requests for comment. An assistant for primary bill sponsor Sen. Billy Garrett, R, told Salon they had forwarded the request to Garrett’s personal email. Garrett did not respond.
Dr. Beth Cook, a board-certified OBGYN based in Summerville, South Carolina, told Salon that the bill is an affront to the patient-physician relationship. It also flies in the face of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ guidance on abortion care. The bill being vague and founded on the “made-up criteria” of the senators who authored it threatens the health and lives of far more people than those who elect to terminate their pregnancies, she said.
“It’s going to lead to a lot of women and their reproductive organs being at risk,” Cook said. She predicted that, should the bill pass, it would lead to more stories of pregnant women dying from complications like sepsis and hemorrhaging because they were denied care, as seen in Texas and Georgia.
“A lot of physicians will be at risk for even providing what is considered routine and standard of care to patients,” she added. “Then you’re going to see physicians not want to practice in a climate like that, and so they’re going to want to leave the state.”
If lawmakers pass SB 323, South Carolina would have one of the most draconian abortion laws in the country. The bill follows a failed proposal filed in the state’s House of Representatives earlier this year that sought to make abortion a homicide by establishing the beginning of human life at fertilization.
Reproductive rights activists in South Carolina argue that SB 323 gaining any traction — let alone passing — in their state, will embolden conservative lawmakers elsewhere to pursue further rollbacks in abortion access. Such efforts take a page out of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation playbook for a second Trump term that calls for culling abortion access at the national level through attacks on abortion medication, emergency abortion access and federal funding for abortion care. Since President Donald Trump took office, some 47% of Project 2025’s reproductive health proposals have been implemented, per the Project 2025 Tracker.
“States like South Carolina, we are the testing ground for a lot of this dangerous legislation that we could potentially see across the country, in these really red states, where you have a large cohort of folks that are deeply aligned with the current national administration,” Amalia Luxardo, CEO of the Women’s Rights & Empowerment Network in South Carolina, said in an interview.
“If this moves forward, there will be a mass leaving,” added Tori Nardone, WREN’s communications manager. “I don’t understand how South Carolina would expect any woman to stay here or choose to raise a family here.”
Nardone herself had to leave the state to obtain an abortion last December. At her 10-week appointment, she learned that her child had triploidy, a genetic condition where a fetus has three sets of chromosomes instead of two, and would miscarry late-term or die at birth.
Shortly after telling her the news, doctors in South Carolina subjected her to hours of pain in failed attempts to obtain a sample of her placenta they could use to show the state she qualified for an abortion. When they suggested pulling down her uterus to acquire the sample, she demanded they stop. They referred her to a facility in Virginia to access care — a small help that they would not be able to provide a pregnant person if lawmakers pass SB 323.
“I am just so tired of begging these lawmakers for basic human decency,” Nardone said, noting that she refuses to ever be pregnant again in South Carolina. “I don’t want to have to get up and tell them my sob story and relive this experience every time they introduce a bill that tries to strip away more and more of our reproductive freedom.”
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Elizabeth, a Greenville resident who asked to go by her middle name out of concern for her job, told Salon that the politicians pushing this legislation risk alienating young female voters.
“It makes me feel like they’re not respecting the democratic process,” she said in an interview. “They seem to take the path that whatever skewed voting got them into office means they can ignore their constituents.”
Last July, the 32-year-old had to travel to Asheville, North Carolina, to obtain a surgical abortion after doctors told her at 15 weeks that her baby had heart failure and was not going to survive. Because the fetus still had a heartbeat, she was denied abortion care under South Carolina’s existing ban. She had to endure the mental anguish of watching her body grow while knowing her first child was dying.
Though she and her husband welcomed a son in June, Elizabeth said that they have considered moving out of the state to protect their family should state lawmakers impose greater restrictions.
Kelly Sharkey, a North Charleston mother of two, was exasperated, questioning what lawmakers’ endgame is in pursuing SB 323 and whose lives they really wish to protect. When she learned at 12 weeks that her pregnancy was failing in May of 2023, she spent the two days before her appointment to terminate pleading with lawmakers to hold off on passing the state’s six-week ban. Only one legislator, former state Sen. Sandy Senn, R, responded to her emails and calls, and voted against the bill, she said. None of the male lawmakers she contacted replied.
After the law took effect, Sharkey’s physician, through tears, informed her that they could no longer provide her with abortion care. What saved her, she told Salon, were the members of the virtual postpartum support group she joined after she’d had her son in 2020. They connected her to a clinic in Maryland, and she traveled by herself to obtain the abortion the same week of her scheduled appointment in South Carolina.
“They really want to hold women back from supporting each other, and that’s not okay,” Sharkey said.
“Criminalizing the care doesn’t stop the actual complications associated with pregnancy. It just makes it more dangerous and traumatic,” she added. “If your goal is to protect families, then start by listening to us because this is going to hurt women. … Whose life is more important? Whose life are you protecting?”
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