South Carolina ‘Dismemberment Abortion’ Ban (H 4634)

H 4634 would make it a felony for a person to knowingly perform a “dismemberment abortion” and thereby kill an “unborn child” unless it is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, a physical illness, or a physical injury if no other medical procedure would suffice for that purpose.

The bill defines “dismemberment abortion” to mean “with the purpose of causing the death of an unborn child, knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors, or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it apart.”

The bill provides for civil and criminal penalties.

This law targets a procedure known as dilation and evacuation (D and E), which is frequently used during second-trimester abortions. According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an abortion using suction aspiration can be performed up to 14 weeks’ gestation, but after 14 weeks the D and E procedure must be used to perform an abortion. As such, dilation and evacuation bans, depending upon their language, may ban all surgical abortion past 14 weeks’ gestation. (Source.)

STATUS

Companion bill to S 531.

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