South Carolina Senate Advances Bill Banning Abortions, Imposing Prison Time on Patients

Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back. You’ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. Last week, the anti-abortion movement crossed a major new redline. A South Carolina Senate committee voted to advance a bill that would, with almost no exceptions, not only ban abortions but also classify abortion as a misdemeanor crime for patients. The proposed law includes a highly unusual misdemeanor punishment of two years in prison. This has never happened before. Until recently, there was a fracture in the post-Dobbs anti- abortion movement surrounding just how far it was willing to go to criminalize abortion-seekers. So-called abortion abolitionists believe that nothing short of homicide charges for women who have abortions and full personhood status for embryos and fetuses is acceptable, while other factions have taken a less absolutist approach, particularly with respect to abortion criminalization. Thanks to the men leading the “abolitionist” movement—and they are all men—15 such “abortion as homicide” bills were introduced in 2025, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Although none of this legislation made it out of committee, many of the bills required a national outcry, a coordinated organizing effort, and hours of testimony and lobbying to ensure they didn’t move forward. That all changed in South Carolina last week. South Carolina Senate Bill 1095, which creates a misdemeanor charge that carries a two-year prison sentence for obtaining or self-managing an abortion, made it out of committee and may be the first such bill in the nation to be voted on by a state legislative chamber. After a similar bill failed in somewhat spectacular fashion last fall, the Legislature returned with a version that changed the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor, in the hope that the current version would be more politically viable. It now appears that a single defecting Republican is the reason it may not face a full Senate vote this year, but it came awfully close—closer than ever before. The willingness to charge women with crimes related to pregnancy and abortion is intensifying. Last month, a Black mother and a veteran in Georgia was charged with murder for self-managing an abortion, a criminal charge with no basis in Georgia law. Although the district attorney has admitted that the charge “is extremely problematic from both a factual and a legal basis,” the case is still proceeding. And last month, it was reported that one of the nation’s most influential anti-abortion groups, Students for Life, endorsed the South Carolina bill that seeks to criminalize abortion patients; it was previously unwilling to support the premise that abortion-seekers should be jailed. At Pregnancy Justice, we have been defending women charged with crimes because of pregnancy, and tracking pregnancy-related prosecutions, for 25 years. “Pregnancy criminalization” occurs when prosecutors use a criminal law to charge a person with a crime that would not exist but for the pregnancy or pregnancy outcome. This is not just a creation of post-Roe America. It is intrinsically connected to the anti-abortion movement’s real goal: fetal personhood, in which embryos and fetuses have full statutory and constitutional rights, status, and protections. As we have documented, fetal personhood has existed in different forms for decades and has led to pregnant women being charged with child neglect or child endangerment for any acts during pregnancy that are deemed to pose a risk to the pregnancy, or for murder or manslaughter for their pregnancy losses. In just the first two years after the end of Roe, we have identified 412 cases of pregnancy-related prosecutions, a significant undercount, given how difficult it is to uncover and verify these cases nationwide, and it has been happening in South Carolina since the 1990s. And yet, even against this existing backdrop of criminalization, the thirst to criminalize women for getting an abortion is seemingly unquenchable. Women are not collateral damage in this regime; they are public enemy No. 1. All eyes must stay on South Carolina, and we must hold the line. All of our lives and liberty, and those of our daughters, nieces, and granddaughters, depend on it.