comment: >
  
  The ruling class thinks they can tell us what our rights are.
  I think we outnumber the ruling class 1000 to 1.
context: While this is equally amazing and surprising news (especially as a South Carolinian), the lead opinion was written by Justice Hearn who is stepping down next month. She has reached mandatory retirement age. 
  The SC legislature will choose her replacement. If they select an anti-abortion Justice, this decision might be reversed. 
  Fingers crossed SC doesn’t do what I have come to expect SC to do. >
  
  I'm guessing they will pass a total abortion ban anyway and the logic used here doesn't preclude a total ban. >
  
  You might think that, but SC legislators chose not to pursue a total ban after a lot of debate. I live there so I've been following the debate pretty closely. >
  
  The Kansas referendum and the disastrous (relative to expectations) midterm elections may well have the GOP rethinking their more extreme anti-abortion stances.  
  Many are probably secretly relieved that they are being blocked by a court, so they can tell their base "well we would do all those things we said we would do, but those darn judges and their blathering about rights, you know..." >
  
  That’s got to be exactly it. 
  This way, they don’t have to bother pissing off a portion of their base by stripping rights away from them, causing them to vote against them until they can get in a better position to not worry about a larger base of voters being against them.
  If they piss off tnag base now, there’s a good chance they could be voted out, and they know it. If they get more GOP judges in, they stand to be able to impose more voting restriction laws which can be used to ensure that pissed off base doesn’t vote in the first place. >
  
  
  Restrictions on abortion care “must be reasonable and it must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy,” Justice Kaye Hearn wrote 
  
  A fucking brain in 2023? Hopefully this is the beginning of a new trend.
  The MAGA crowd did quite the opposite. Source: Looked around. >
  
  Yep. Those mandatory waiting periods and frivolous rules regarding doctor appointments (for example, requiring women to view an ultrasound) are deliberately designed to run out the clock in states with partial abortion bans. 
  A woman may discover she's pregnant at nine weeks, but if she wants an abortion her doctor could say "well, our state has a twelve-week ban and we're completely booked for the next five, so you're SOL." >
  
  I practice law in SC and was pleasantly surprised with the result considering our state supreme court definitely has a 3-2 conservative tilt. After reading the opinion, it appears that the deciding factor was the fact that the state admitted at oral arguments that the legislature hadn’t actually considered any factual or scientific data regarding when the average woman learns she is pregnant when it decided to set the bar for abortions at six weeks. Basically, the legislature passed the six week ban as opposed to a “from conception” bill in order to give the illusion that woman had a choice in deciding whether to get an abortion (even though everyone knows six weeks is absolutely not enough time for a woman to find out she is pregnant and then have the procedure done). However, one of the conservative justices agreed that the state can’t arbitrarily pass a law limiting a woman’s (state) constitutional right to privacy without at least doing the bare minimum amount of fact finding, which in this case should have included data regarding when women typically know they are pregnant. This will not be the final word, as the justice who wrote the majority opinion is retiring and will be replaced by the republican legislature. >
  
  Good. Eat shit, Republican "law makers."