An exterior view of the South Carolina State House, Columbia
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Several states have banned and criminalized abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
A South Carolina legislator proposed the death penalty as punishment for women who get abortions.
The new bill, still in the legislature, would equate abortion to homicide.
South Carolina is the latest GOP-led state to propose a bill that would make the death penalty a punishment for abortion.
State Rep. Rob Harris introduced the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023 last week, which could make getting an abortion the same as committing homicide. The bill had been prefiled in December and is now sits in the Judiciary Committee.
“What I did the other day is I took the opportunity while the rest of the house was dealing with H. 3774, Human Life Protection Act, a different bill, I put the first amendment on that bill when we were processing it on the floor and I tried to amend it to basically strike the whole thing and replace it with my bill,” Harris told WBTW.
South Carolina state law currently punishes abortion with up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $1,000. The new bill would work to define a fetus as any state of development as a person that “should be equally protected from fertilization to natural death.”
The bill states its purpose was to “ensure that an unborn child who is a victim of ASSAULT is afforded equal protection under the assault laws of the State, with exceptions.”
“If we call it life and define it as life, then why should anyone, not just mothers, why should anybody be able to take that life? If it’s life, it needs to be protected like any other life,” Harris told WPDE.
Vicki Ringer, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, criticized the bill.
“That’s a hard pill to swallow for anybody,” Ringer told WBTW. “To recognize that you are not valuable. To call this equal protection, it is far from equal. It is giving greater weight to a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus than it is to a human being. You can consider a fetus to be a person, but you can’t consider it to have more weight than the living person who is a life fully lived on this planet.”
The development comes as at least 13 states have banned abortion following the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade last June.
The penalty is one of the harshest, but this isn’t the first time a state lawmaker has proposed the death penalty for abortion. In March 2021, Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton proposed legislation that would ban and criminalize abortion which could carry the death penalty, the Texas Tribune reported. The bill, similar to those like it in the past, did not pass the state legislature.
Harris did not respond to Insider’s email request for comment at the time of publication.