Few
COLUMBIA, S.C. - A South Carolina law banning abortions after a “fetal heartbeat” can be detected means any heartbeat at all, the state’s highest court ruled, shortening the allowable period for abortions to as little as six weeks.
Planned Parenthood and other rights groups argued the law applied to fetal hearts with four chambers, which usually form after nine weeks. But the law covers any detectable “cardiac activity” of electrical impulses and sound from a beating heart, the South Carolina Supreme Court concluded.
The decision on the third trip to the South Carolina Supreme Court ends a dispute over whether the law sets a time limit on abortions or outlaws them based on observable fetal activity. The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected the 2021 version of the law, but upheld a 2023 version, without at that time resolving the question of what “fetal heartbeat” means.
“Now that we squarely address the definition of `fetal heartbeat’ in the 2023 Act, our interpretation of the term is not based on an assessment of the number of weeks a woman has been pregnant,” the court said in a May 14 opinion by Justice John Cannon Few.
“Instead, it is based on medically and objectively observable evidence that a medical professional may identify.”
Planned Parenthood argued the South Carolina General Assembly intended to push back the deadline to nine weeks, when a fully formed, four-chamber heart has developed, because the Supreme Court had declared a six-week limit unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court rejected that analysis, saying the definition of “fetal heartbeat” was unchanged in the 2023 version of the law, indicating legislators understood it didn’t refer to a specific number of weeks.
“We do not use this legislative silence to conclude what the General Assembly did mean, but rather, as a crystal-clear indicator of what the General Assembly did not mean,” the court said.
“In this case, it then becomes clear the General Assembly intended to ban abortions at the biologically identifiable moment in time we explained when we stated our interpretation of `fetal heartbeat’ at the outset of this opinion.”
Women are frequently unaware of a pregnancy at six weeks, making it difficult to impossible to abort an unwanted fetus within that time limit. Supporters of the law say 95% of fetuses survive to live birth after developing a detectable heartbeat.
Planned Parenthood also argued the heartbeat is meaningless since a six-week-old baby is an embryo, not a fetus, and has no circulatory system yet. But the court noted the legislature used the words “embryo” and “fetus” interchangeably in another law.
