Lawmaker Who Voted for Abortion Ban Says He’s Losing Sleep Over Banned Abortions
South Carolina state Rep. Neal Collins, who voted for a six-week abortion ban last year, regrets it now that he understands its very predictable consequences.
AbortionPolitics

South Carolina state Rep. Neal Collins, who voted for a six-week abortion ban last year, now apparently regrets doing so after a judge let that law take effect in June and the horrific yet extremely predictable consequences have begun. (The state Supreme Court temporarily blocked it on August 17.)
Now that the state House is considering a new, near-total ban, Collins is upset about the reality that he helped bring about. The second week the law was in effect, a doctor in Anderson, South Carolina, told Collins about a pregnant 19-year-old who came to the emergency room after her water broke at 15 weeks, Collins told his colleagues during a hearing. The fetus can’t survive if delivered at that stage, the doctor told him, but it still had fetal cardiac activity so hospital attorneys told doctors they couldn’t intervene with a dilation and evacuation procedure. They had to discharge her and wait for her to finish miscarrying.
It appears this conversation was the first time that Collins—a person who votes on bills that criminalize healthcare providers—learned incomplete miscarriages can kill people.
“The doctor told me…she’s going to pass this fetus in the toilet. She’s going to have to deal with that on her own. There’s a greater than 50 percent chance that she’s going to lose her uterus,” Collins said, sharing a story of the consequences of his own actions. “There’s a 10 percent chance that she will develop sepsis and herself die.”