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During a recent public hearing for the House Judiciary Committee on new legislation that would ban most abortions in South Carolina, Rep. Neal Collins said he previously voted in favor of the fetal heartbeat bill, whichbansall abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which is around6 weeksinto a pregnancy.
Collins said shortly after that bill became a law, he received a call from a doctor about a 19-year-old who was at a local ER.
“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 [the fetus]. So their only choices were to admit the 19-year-old until that fetal heartbeat stopped” or discharge her.
He said he asked how long it would take for the heartbeat to stop and was told, “seconds, minutes, hours, maybe days.” Doctors ultimately discharged the 19-year-old, who Collins said was sent home to deal with the loss “on her own” and faced a 50 percent chance of losing her uterus in the process. A doctor told Collins there was a 10 percent chance the teen would “develop sepsis and herself die.”
“That weighs on me,” Collins said. “I voted for that bill. These are affecting people, and we’re having a meeting about this.”
After a brief pause, Collins said he didn’t get any sleep for days; a week later, he said he reached out to the doctor, who did not know how the teenager was doing.
After following up two weeks later, Collins found out the 19-year-old came back to the ER and doctors “extract[ed]” the fetus, which at that point no longer had a heartbeat.
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“What we do matters,” said Collins, appearing to hold back tears.
He continued, “Out of respect for the process, I’m not voting today. But I wanted to be clear that myself and many others are not in a position to vote for this bill without significant changes to the bill.”
In a 13-7 vote, the committee opted to move a near-total abortion ban forward to the House floor, according toThe State,The Associated PressandThe Hill.
On June 24, the Supreme Courtoverturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion and letting individual states decide whether to allow them.
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source: people.com
