Planned Parenthood pushes for nine week abortion care at SC Supreme Court

COLUMBIA, SC (WOLO) — Representatives with Planned Parenthood made oral arguments before the SC Supreme Court Wednesday morning.

The hearing follows a lawsuit over the state’s current heartbeat bill — and how the language within it should be interpreted.

Catherine Humphreville, Senior Staff Attorney for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, asserting that the fetal heartbeat law should be interpreted for abortion care to be provided through nine weeks of pregnancy.

“The act itself doesn’t specify a gestational age at which it bans abortion. And so we think after nine weeks is the better construction because of what the ban itself calls for, and so you don’t have what’s going to become a heart until after nine weeks, you don’t have a fetus until after nine weeks, and you don’t have steady, repetitive, rhythmic, contractions of what’s going to become the heart until that point,” says Humphreville.

Grayson Lambert, Senior Legal Counsel with the state, argued the fetal heartbeat has a different meaning.

“The Circuit Court said it was clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that that point was approximately six weeks and the Circuit Court was correct,” says Lambert.

With Planned Parenthood also receiving pushback from some of the justices, saying the assumption of six weeks regarding the heartbeat bill seemed to be adopted by all parties involved.

“Point being, that if we had started this process with y’all taking the position that this is not a six week bill but a nine week bill, but the outcome of Planned Parenthood One, would probably have been different,” says Justice John Cannon Few.

The question of when an embryo becomes a fetus was raised throughout the hearing.

“What would be the medical criteria, the observable things that a doctor would look at to say ‘Ok, I see a, b, c… and therefore the transition from embryonic to fetus has occurred. What are those criteria?” asks Few.

With one justice saying that perhaps a number of weeks shouldn’t be included at all — rather that an abortion should be banned when a fetal heartbeat is present, with no number of weeks mentioned.

Taylor Shelton, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, says she had an abortion in September of 2023, just two weeks after the ban went into effect.

She says she and numerous others were neglected by the healthcare system and had to jump through unnecessary hoops to access needed care.

“What you have gone through is not okay, it will never be okay, and we will not stop pushing for justice until our reproductive rights are restored and protected. I stand for the right to abortion and I stand by the decision I made to have one,” Shelton says through tears.

The SC Supreme Court is expected to make a decision on the interpretation of the law within the next couple of months.