Privileged women will always be able to get safe terminations but for the rest prosecutions will have a chilling effect
In October 2021 a 33-year-old woman in Greenville, South Carolina, went to the hospital with labor pains. According to a police incident report, the woman told healthcare workers that she’d taken abortion pills to end her pregnancy; her fetus was estimated to be stillborn at 25 weeks. This week she was arrested and charged with performing or soliciting an abortion. Abortion is currently legal in South Carolina until 20 weeks of pregnancy but it is one of just a handful of states with a law explicitly criminalizing self-managed abortions.
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