The South Carolina Supreme Court has struck down a law banning abortion after six months of pregnancy.
For the first time since the end of the right to abortion in the United States, a Supreme Court of an American state guaranteed it Thursday for its inhabitants, in the name of the local Constitution, inflicting a major setback to opponents of abortion.
South Carolina’s highest court has struck down a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
“We believe that the right to privacy enshrined in our Constitution covers women’s decisions to have an abortion,” she said.
It is with a similar reasoning that the Supreme Court of the United States had sanctified, in 1973 in its decision Roe v. Wade, the right of American women to have an abortion. But last June, in a historic about-face, she deemed this decision to be wrong and gave freedom to each state to legislate as it pleases in the matter.
Cascading appeals
Since then, the country has been fractured between the States that have decreed prohibitions, mainly located in the South and the center, and those that have reinforced access to pregnancy terminations on their soil, rather on the coasts.
And this landscape is very fluid, each measure being the subject of cascading appeals before the local courts.
Since June, restrictive measures have been urgently blocked in several states pending substantive decisions. The South Carolina Supreme Court is the first to issue a final judgment.
“This is a monumental victory for the protection of legal abortions in the South,” reacted the organization Planned Parenthood, which manages many clinics practicing abortions.
The ambiguous use of the word “reasonable”
This opens up new prospects for women in the region deprived of access to abortion, particularly in the states of Alabama and Tennessee.
However, this is not necessarily the end of the war. In its decision, the Supreme Court of South Carolina considers that the right to respect for private life can be “limited” provided it is done in a “reasonable” manner.
This could allow local lawmakers to introduce new restrictions.
