Comment: Debates over abortion bans worse than bans themselves

By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post

South Carolina’s House of Representatives is the latest legislative body to pass a near-total ban on abortion, following nauseating and weird floor debates that occurred on the House floor Tuesday and Wednesday. I wanted to see the sausage get made, and the process, it turns out, is even worse than you thought. Here is what I saw.

I watched members of the House meander to the dais to propose two dozen amendments to the original bill, all of which were designed to make the bill a little more or a little less draconian, but often more.

I watched one member suggest that social media could be used to spy on women suspected of seeking abortions. I watched one member propose prison time for women caught with abortion-causing drugs. I watched one claim that women lie “about getting raped or knocked up.” I watched many of these same members congratulate themselves for their humanity.

I watched a representative propose rape and incest exceptions specifically for underage girls. He gave, as a hypothetical example, a 12-year-old raped by her father. I watched as other representatives, who insisted they understood that rape was awful, declare that even a case like this would not be worth an exception.

“She had a choice,” an old man declared of this hypothetical pregnant 12-year-old girl, suggesting that she should have gone to a pharmacy and gotten Plan B after her father raped her, rather than need an abortion.

When asked how she would get to the pharmacy — would she ask her rapist father to drive her? — the representative replied that she could get there by ambulance. Did he think one would magically be waiting outside of her house after the rape?

You know what? I don’t think he really understands anything about rape at all.

I watched liberal Democrats vote with the most conservative Republicans in an unsuccessful attempt to make the bill too unpalatable for moderate Republicans to pass, hoping this strategy could tank the bill entirely.

“We got chess right now,” a Republican representative said, finally getting wise to what was happening. “And some people are playing checkers. And some of us don’t even know what game is going on.”

I watched a representative in a maroon blazer and plaid tie, a man who looked like a chorus member from a Christmas play about real estate agents, try to pass an amendment saying women who had abortions should be punished fully as murderers.

I watched as this particular amendment was voted down, and I felt immense relief.

Watching these bills being debated was like watching a conclave of grocers discuss whether customers, who used to be able to shop freely, should now be allowed to purchase a maximum of one raisin and half a macaroni noodle per week, or whether that would be too indulgent. How debasing it feels to beg for that macaroni noodle. How debasing, and how necessary. When the concept of a meal is off the table, when you know your choices are to accept scraps or starve, you fight for the scraps and try to forget what it once felt like to be full.

Watching these bills get made is useful to understanding exactly what world is being built in the absence of Roe v. Wade, and how. By looking at what ends up on the cutting room floor, we can see the deepest beliefs and desires and assumptions of state lawmakers to whom the Supreme Court has punted the ball. Not what laws they think they can pass with the right coalition of votes, but what laws some of them think would actually be just and moral. Sometimes you have to see it to believe it.

I watched a Republican propose an amendment that would allow for abortions in cases of “extreme fetal anomalies.” Not in cases of chromosomal aberrations like Down syndrome, he clarified, but in cases where the anomalies were incompatible with life. Cases where a fetus is developing without a brain, he specified. Cases where a woman is forced to carry a child she knows will die within hours if it draws a breath at all.

I watched as a fellow party member informed him that, no, such an exception should not be made because such fetal anomalies are often “misdiagnosed.”

(“That is preposterous and absurd,” said Cara Heuser, a spokesperson for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and an expert in high-risk pregnancies, when I asked her later about whether the absence of a fetus’s brain might be misdiagnosed.)

I watched as a Republican begged for clarifying exceptions to embryos created via IVF. It was an issue, he said, that was “very, very” personal to him. He didn’t give more details. His request for exceptions were denied.

I watched as a Democrat proposed that the bill be given to the people of South Carolina to vote on, the way that the people of Kansas were allowed to vote on their own abortion bill. Her proposal was tabled.

I watched as Democrats sought procedural loopholes to stall the bill; I watched as a female representative told her colleagues, from the podium, that her own two pregnancies had been life-threatening.

I watched as multiple Republicans lectured the Democrats for not getting in line and trying to make the bill “better.” And by “better,” they meant, something that would pass.

“This is not our bill,” a Democrat responded in a raised voice from the podium. “We’re not the ones trying to strip the rights and freedoms and equality and health-care choices away from the women of South Carolina.” If Republicans wanted the votes so badly, the Democrat said, “Get your own house in order.”

I watched, as the hours progressed, how the opponents of the bill accepted the defeat they always knew was an eventuality, using their time from the podium as a lamentation rather than as a pleading.

Just before the final vote, when the bill passed, 67-35, I watched Democrats lament what would happen to the women of South Carolina. What would happen to the families of South Carolina.

They lamented what would happen to the babies who would now be born to parents who hadn’t wanted them, in a state unprepared to support them, at the behest of politicians whose interest in them seemed to wane as soon as they exited the womb.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.” Follow her on Twitter @MonicaHesse.