Women for SC Senate in 2024

And let's get some more in the House too

This week we had two fabulous events on campus to mark Women’s History Month. On Monday, Josh Malkin from the ACLU of South Carolina came to talk about his work advocating for our civil rights against an onslaught of bills coming out of the SC legislature attacking women and trans kids. He gave the students great advice about the best ways to take action, including showing up for hearings at the statehouse, emailing and calling your state representatives, or even better, requesting a meeting with them. If you’re not sure who your state senators and representatives are, you can look them up here.

And yesterday Diane Perpich, director of Women’s Leadership at Clemson, came to give a talk about how we can reconceive of leadership for our times. She explained some pretty grim examples of how, even though women are studying law, medicine, and business in equal numbers, we increasingly lose women in the pipeline so that we have fewer women as practicing lawyers and physicians or CEOs. Most distressing to me was the huge gender imbalance we see in political leadership. Even though the last two congresses have had the most number of women ever, we’re still hovering around 25%. At the state level, the numbers are even more grim: only 5 of our 46 state senators are women (11%), and only 20 of our 124 state representatives are women (16%). From 1975-2016, only three women TOTAL served in the South Carolina senate. And of course, with the retirement of Justice Kaye Hearn, we now have the nation’s only all-male state Supreme Court, knocking us back 40 years to 1988 (the last time the court was all male).

Graphic from WREN.

What both talks really impressed upon me is that we need to show up. While structural barriers (lower pay, unaffordable childcare, division of household labor) keep women from seeking out leadership positions, sometimes women disqualify themselves by thinking they aren’t good enough to run. This is why the work of Emerge South Carolina and WREN (the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network) and of course Women’s Leadership at Clemson are so important: they give women the tools and confidence they need to run for office. Diane reminded us that when women run, they win in equal numbers to men. And we need women in the statehouse when men try to pass horrific legislation that turns women in criminals for making their own reproductive healthcare decisions.

In a recent piece in The Post and Courier (which, overall I would say has done a good job covering abortion rights in the state since Roe fell), Seanna Adcox seems to take the national media to task for giving so much attention to the fetal personhood bill that would have subjected women to the death penalty for having an abortion. She points out that the bill had no chance of passing, but what is also apparent in her coverage is that the bill’s sponsor Rob Harris (the father of ten who worked as a nurse before getting elected last year) claims he didn’t know that the bill would have subjected women to the death penalty. He says he just wanted to “save babies.”

But you can’t just “save babies” like there is no other human involved (you’d think his medical training would have informed his legislating, but no evidence of that so far). The speaker of the house, Kevin McCravy, claims that the House will accept nothing short of a ban on abortion at conception. Adcox uses this to point out that any further abortion bans are unlikely to pass because the House and Senate can’t reconcile their positions (a ban at conception won’t pass the Senate, thanks in part to the efforts of one of the few women in the Senate, Sandy Senn). I’m so thankful for these holdouts, but they could be voted out of office next year, and then these “impossible” bills Adcox seems to dismiss could easily become law. And as Vicki Ringer points out, we’ve seen fetal personhood laws proposed at the state level for the last 25 years, so while this bill might seem extreme, it is part of an organized effort to criminalize pregnancy that has been going on in this country for a long time.

At the end of the day, it is only because people are showing up to fight back against these bills that they aren’t sailing through the Republican supermajority legislature. Any law that criminalizes abortion hurts women, and as we’ve seen in other states like Idaho and Texas, will drive OBGYNs out of our state, a place that already has some of the worst maternal death rates in the country. The bills that attack trans kids will have the same effect: if we criminalize gender-affirming care, we lose doctors, not to mention the effect it has on the kids themselves.

It is really insane to look at what men in the Republican party are willing to do to solve “problems” like elective abortion: turn all OBGYNs and women into potential felons, increase maternal healthcare deserts, take safe medication that treats a wide variety of ailments off the market, let women almost die of sepsis while miscarrying even when there is no chance of a fetus surviving because it still has a “heartbeat.” To “protect” women in sports, they launch a full-scale assault against CHILDREN, effectively trying to erase trans identity to shore up their flimsy understanding of their own masculinities. In South Carolina, these men aren’t even taking the time to write these bills themselves: they are just copying and pasting from special interest groups (which might explain why Nurse Harris was confused about what his own bill would do).

In the legislative process, there is a way for these legislatures to more effectively govern: by listening to experts and listening to their constituents. Maybe it’s because we’re gendered to do so, but I think maybe women legislators might do a better job of actually listening. Let’s start planning those campaigns, ladies.