Imagine a United States in which you were compelled, perhaps through a lottery similar to that of jury duty, to donate bone marrow, a kidney, a portion of your liver, or some other non-vital organ. Your entire life would be disrupted for a significant period of time. You would be subject to medical checkups, tests, and ultimately a procedure during which you could die. You would have a recovery period during which you would be unable to work and might experience complications that limited your function, perhaps long term, or required you to have other medical procedures. And during this process, it would be easy to imagine you would undergo intense mental and emotional distress.
This is already the position of people who can get pregnant in South Carolina today, currently, right now, with the 6-week abortion ban that violates our constitutionally protected right to privacy in place. And Senate Bill 323, just made things a whole lot worse.
I was disgusted to read the text of this bill, introduced by extremist fanatic Robert Cash, which would make abortion punishable as a homicide. This is a bad bill for so many reasons: it criminalizes speech about abortion in a multitude of ways; it allows private citizens to sue over someone else’s abortion as if we lived in some kind of tattletale authoritarian horror movie; it does not consider risk of suicide or “psychological or emotional conditions” to be medically necessary exceptions; it creates multiple contradictory requirements regarding a physician’s judgement; and perhaps most horrifically, it removes the fatal fetal anomaly exception.
However, it fails on its very first premise: Abortion isn’t murder.
Regardless of how we feel or what we believe about pregnancy, there is no supportable legal basis for considering a fertilized egg, or even a fetus, a life. Fetuses do not have social security numbers or birth certificates; they cannot be claimed on tax returns as dependents.
But even if these obstacles were somehow overcome, we still do not require the people of South Carolina to sacrifice their individual sanctity to save a life. We actually passed our own legislation against this with the mask mandate ban Governor McMaster signed several years ago—we are not required to wear a mask to protect other people from potentially deadly viruses. Nor are we required to donate a non-vital organ or even to donate blood, a minimally invasive procedure with no long-term risks or side effects, to save lives, even though people die each day for lack of them.
In the 1978 case McFall v. Shimp, Judge John P. Flaherty ruled that an individual cannot be legally compelled to undergo medical treatment at their own MENTAL OR PHYSICAL expense—which does away with this bill’s exclusion of “psychological and emotional conditions”—to save another person’s life. He made the distinction between moral conflicts and legal obligations—in this case, any moral obligation that might exist cannot be legally compelled due to the sanctity of the individual. He explained this best in his own words:
“For our law to compel defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded. To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn.”
Do not undermine the sanctity of the individual by refusing to protect the right to voluntary abortion as an unavoidable facet of bodily autonomy. Speak out against this appalling bill.
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