Six months ago, South Carolina’s all-male Supreme Court upheld a statewide, six-week abortion ban — declaring constitutional the dangerous measure that Republican lawmakers and Gov. Henry McMaster muscled through the legislature last spring.
Authoring the court’s majority opinion, even Justice John Kittredge acknowledged that “the 2023 Act infringes on a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy.” Nevertheless, the Court still greenlit the extreme law, dealing a grave blow to the fundamental freedoms of women across South Carolina.
The decision also represented yet another setback for reproductive health care in the American South, which has been under significant threat since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in summer 2022. Scores of restrictive, anti-choice bills by Republican state legislatures have curtailed the basic rights of millions of women throughout the region.
But on the final day of Black History Month, it is important to recognize the extraordinary harm that South Carolina’s ban — and those in more than a dozen other states — have inflicted upon Black women, exacerbating a maternal health crisis that splits starkly along racial lines.
We already know that the United States is experiencing an epidemic of Black maternal morbidity and mortality. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Black women are at least three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women, despite the fact that more than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.
A sinister mixture of factors is to blame for these disparities in health outcomes, including underlying chronic conditions, discrimination within the health care system and socioeconomic barriers to quality treatment. Now, experts agree that anti-choice bans on women’s reproductive freedom will only worsen the racial divide — resulting in the deaths of even more Black women.
Research from the Commonwealth Fund has found that states with anti-choice bans have “higher rates of maternal mortality and infant death, especially among women of color,” as well as “greater racial inequities across their health care systems.” According to another recent study in Frontiers in Public Health, “restrictions creating geographic, transportation and financial barriers to obtaining an abortion can result in increased rates of maternal death and adverse outcomes … especially among” Black women.
Beyond targeting Black women, ProPublica reports that these anti-choice bans will make it more difficult to measure maternal mortality, as officials struggle to determine whether insufficient access to reproductive health care played a role in a patient’s death.
In seeking to combat the Black maternal health crisis, South Carolina faces a few obvious barriers. For starters, McMaster has continued to refuse the federal government’s offer of additional Medicaid coverage, which would expand maternal health care in the state.
But more glaringly, South Carolinians remain represented in Washington, D.C., by politicians who have been happy to add to the problem by hacking away at reproductive freedom. Take U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, who has supported a six-week abortion ban as far back as 2019 — when she voted for a fetal heartbeat bill in the South Carolina legislature.
Just last year in Congress, Mace co-sponsored a measure to make health coverage that includes reproductive care ineligible for federal funding. She also voted for an NDAA amendment that makes it harder for our servicewomen to access health care — a policy she herself called an “asshole move.”
And after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled this month that frozen embryos are “children,” we were reminded that Mace in 2022 co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act — which would make Alabama’s restrictions on IVF and fertility treatments the law of the land.
Unlike Mace, I believe that politicians have no place in the doctor’s office, and they have no right to stop the women of the First Congressional District from starting their own families.
Lowcountry voters deserve a leader who will work to prevent needless deaths resulting from extreme Republicans’ restrictions on personal liberty. This November, let’s defeat Mace, strengthen women’s health care and help save Black lives by codifying reproductive freedom into federal law.
Michael B. Moore is the founding president of the International African American Museum and a Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress in South Carolina’s 1st congressional district.
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