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A Republican lawmaker in South Carolina singaled that he is having second thoughts about supporting strict abortion restrictions after learning about the experience of teenager with a non-viable pregnancy. It is a realization that other Republicans should pay attention to across the country.
Last year, state Rep. Neal Collins voted in favor of South Carolina’s new six-week abortion ban. That law had taken effect in late June after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. On Aug. 16, Collins told fellow lawmakers how a conversation with a doctor led to him reflecting on that vote, and how he could not support an even stricter abortion law without changes.
“The second week that this — that the fetal heartbeat bill became law, a doctor called me… A 19-year-old girl appeared at the ER. She was 15 weeks pregnant. Her water broke. And the fetus was unviable,” Collins said during a South Carolina House Judiciary Committee meeting. “The standard of care was to advise her that they could extract or she could go home. The attorneys told the doctors that because of the fetal heartbeat bill — because that 15-week-old had a heartbeat — the doctors could not extract. So their only choices were to admit the 19-year-old until that fetal heartbeat stopped — I asked how long does it take to stop, she said seconds, minutes, hours, maybe days — or discharge. They discharged that 19-year-old.
“The doctor told me at that point there is a 50% chance — well, first she’s going to pass this fetus in the toilet. She’s going to have to deal with that on her own. There’s a 50% chance — greater than 50% chance that she’s going to lose her uterus. There’s a 10% chance that she will develop sepsis and herself, die.
“That weighs on me. I voted for that bill. These are affecting people, and we’re having a meeting about this. It took — that whole week, I did not sleep.” Collins continued. “Out of respect for the process, I’m not voting today. But I want it to be clear that myself and many others are not in a position to vote for this bill without significant changes to the bill.”
Let’s be clear about a few things. First, Collins could and should have known about these potential consequences of the heartbeat law before he voted for it. People have been warning about the health consequences of restricting reproductive care for a long time. Second, Collins didn’t exactly give an impassioned defense of a woman’s right to choose. And third, the even stricter bill being considered now in South Carolina passed out of committee by a 13-7 vote that same day. So regardless of some well-said (if late) remarks from one lawmaker about consequences he hadn’t anticipated, it wouldn’t be surprising to see South Carolina erode reproductive rights and jeopardize women’s health even further.
With that backdrop, it is obviously difficult to look for silver linings or be optimistic about potential steps in the right direction. But compromise, even on an issue with so much emotion and literal lives in the balance, is still needed (perhaps it is these issues that need it more than any other). And compromise requires looking for green flags of possible areas of agreement — of new realizations and commitments to act differently.
We see Collins’ remarks as such a green flag. It might be easy for some to dismiss comments like these as too little, too late. But in the post-Roe world we now live, protecting the right to abortion care where it still exists and rebuilding it where it doesn’t will require sustained dialogue with people who don’t always think exactly like one another. It will require encouragement of realizations like Collins’.
And it will require legislative action in the same spirit of compromise. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Maine Sen. Susan Collins, have offered this kind of path forward with the Reproductive Freedom For All Act, which would write abortion care protections into federal law while also allowing for some restrictions (which was also generally the case before the Roe and Casey v. Planned Parenthood decisions were struck down in June).
Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive choice, while also supporting some reasonable restrictions on abortion. Passing a legislative compromise or popular referendum that reflects this reality is a difficult and imperfect solution to safeguarding something that had been established as a constitutional right for roughly five decades. But thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decision, it is a necessary solution. We hope that realizations from Republicans like Rep. Neal Collins in South Carolina make that type of compromise more likely.
