South Carolina Women Senators Vote in Line with Majority Opinion

Also can someone tell Senator Loftis to call me back?

Yesterday some dude on Twitter informed me that, because he had grown up in North Carolina, he could confirm that most people would support the “reasonable” 12-week ban that Republicans sprung on the legislature this week (after working on it in secret for months, gutting a bill that had nothing to do with abortion to sneak the text through the committee process, and convincing Democrat Tricia Cotham to switch parties). I replied, in my most feminist-splaining tone, that well, actually, the polling doesn’t seem to support his (what, gut feeling?) about what voters want.

I showed him the polling, but he wasn’t convinced. Regardless of that guy, in poll after poll, we see that GOP bans on abortion rights are unpopular and not supported by the majority of voters, which made me surprised to see Senator Greg Hembree arguing that we should let the voters decide in a state-wide referendum to amend the Constitution. His colleagues, apparently afraid of the democratic process, have consistently voted down his attempts.

Hembree is an anti-choice senator and one of the sponsors of the six-week ban that was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, so my guess is that he thinks that voting to amend the constitution would take away the right to privacy for abortion, as they did in Tennessee (and why the state has been unable to constitutionally challenge their truly horrific bans), thus clearing the way for the legislature to pass near-total abortion bans at six weeks.

I think Hembree, like that dude on Twitter, might want to read the polling data more closely. I’d love to see it come to a vote, but the GOP isn’t too interested in democracy these days (in fact, they’re openly against it, calling themselves in favor of a “republic” whenever it suits them to thwart the will of voters on basically everything). No way the issue gets in front of statewide voters anytime soon, but hey, the longer it takes, the closer we are to 2028, when Millenials and Gen Z become the majority voting block, and these dudes definitely do not want to know how much these groups, across party lines, overwhelmingly support abortion rights.

In the meantime, I’m grateful for the five women in our state Senate, who filibustered last week for three days to block yet another attempt at a total abortion ban from conception. Their frustration was palpable in their statements that the legislators were trying to vote it through yet again when they clearly didn’t have the votes, and also that the majority male body had no real understanding of the stakes of this for women. Senator Gustafson delightfully spent some of the time going over in detail how pregnancy changes the body at every stage, while Senator McLeod had this to say:

“Just as rape is about power and control, so is this total ban,” McLeod said Thursday. “Those who continue to push legislation like this are raping us again with their indifference, violating us again with their righteous indignation, taunting us again with their insatiable need to play God while they continue to pass laws that are ungodly.”

Also watch this from Senator Senn. She’s not here to play.

I’m really grateful that these women could work together to block yet another ban. I’m less grateful to my own senator in Greenville, 80 year old Dwight Loftis, who has never returned or acknowledged my repeated calls to his office. When he ran for the senate seat in 2019, Democrat Tina Belge ran against him. She probably wouldn’t have voted for a total abortion ban, like Loftis has done repeatedly. And maybe she would have even returned my calls. Hopefully 2024 sees more women nabbing those senate seats. These ladies need company.