A South Carolina GOP state legislator claims he’s been losing sleeping after being told by a doctor the fetal heartbeat bill he voted for could’ve killed a teenage girl.
Sounds like he has more conscience than most Republicans, but wouldn’t it have been better to consider the consequences of the bill before he voted for it?
To begin with, the doctor explained, the bill confuses electrical activity with heartbeat (details here; for a timeline of fetus heart development, go here). The linked story doesn’t provide details of the girl’s medical condition; it only says the hospital’s lawyers told its doctors they couldn’t extract the fetus while it had a heartbeat because of the law, so she was sent home.
That meant the reality of the situation was, “She’s going to have to deal with [it] on her own,” and would have to expel the fetus “in the toilet.” The doctor then added, “There’s a … greater than 50% chance that she’s going to lose her uterus. There’s a 10% chance that she will develop sepsis and … die.” That’s what the Republican legislators did to that girl by blindly passing the bill without thinking through its consequences.
As it happened, “the teen was able to return to have the fetus safely extracted between the point where the electrical activity stopped and the point where her body would expel it.” I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know how wide or narrow a time window that is. She may have been very lucky.
“Medical professionals have been warning lawmakers and the public about the dangerous legal and medical consequences of strict anti-abortion laws for some time,” Huffington Post says (link above), so they can’t claim ignorance. They’re not listening.
As a result, “With the threat of professional discipline, a revoked medical license or even criminal penalties hanging over their heads, doctors in states with the most restrictive laws are now conceding some medical decisions to lawyers.” Is that what you want? It’s what Republican legislatures are doing to their citizens.
I’m not the only one pouncing on this legislator’s belated recognition that his party’s hasty legislating on abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise is harmful. His “admission prompted some in favor of abortion access to pounce, mocking him on social media for only recently realizing the potential impact of his votes.” But South Carolina Democrats are asking for restraint, saying they’re going to need “GOP legislators who may have voted a certain way in the past to grow & evolve” in order to secure more rational abortion laws.
I hear their argument, but people can’t grow and evolve in the ?GOP, because if they do, they’ll be run out. And so far, only one GOP legislator in the entire country has changed parties — and that over the Capitol riot, not insane abortion laws (see story here). Democrats are fooling themselves if they think there are reasonable Republicans or they can get Republican votes for less than blindly restrictive abortion laws.
And I wouldn’t rely on Republican conscience for anything. Collectively, they don’t have a conscience. If they did, they wouldn’t be trying to overthrow democracy, threatening to jail doctors and teachers or people who share water bottles in voting lines, or all the other garbage things GOP legislatures are doing these days.