Abortions in SC fell dramatically after state ban took effect. Here's how much. (2024)

COLUMBIA — The number of abortions provided in South Carolina plummeted by about 80 percent following the implementation of the state’s six-week abortion ban in August 2023, new state data shows.

In the first eight months of 2023, during which abortion was legal for the first 5½ months of pregnancy in South Carolina, clinics and hospitals provided 7,397 abortions, or about 954 a month, according to Department of Health and Environmental Control figures released June 13.

After the state Supreme Court ruled that the six-week ban was constitutional, allowing it to take effect on Aug. 23, 790 abortions were performed during the rest of the year, or about 186 a month, according to the data.

That’s an 80.5 percent decrease in the average number of abortions performed each month.

A spokesman for Gov. Henry McMaster said the numbers show the law has worked as intended.

“Although the governor would prefer to see a day where no one seeks an abortion, the data proves that the Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act has been a success, saving thousands of innocent lives and putting an end to South Carolina’s reputation as an abortion destination,” Brandon Charochak said in a statement, using the six-week ban’s official title.

McMaster signed the six-week ban in May of last year.

Abortion rights supporters said the data reflects how draconian the law is, not that it’s reducing abortion.

“The abortion ban that was put into place by South Carolina politicians has not changed the number of abortions for South Carolina women, it’s just changed geography,” said Vicki Ringer, director of public affairs at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. “They’re forced to travel out of state at great cost, a lot of time and unnecessary hardships to seek the abortion they want.”

Planned Parenthood, which operates a pair of clinics in Columbia and Charleston that offer abortions, had already reported a an even larger decline in abortions in court filings, but the DHEC data offer a more complete statewide picture because it takes into account abortions performed at a clinic in Greenville and in hospitals.

In 2022 and 2023, South Carolina became an abortion policy outlier in the South as abortion remained accessible here while many other states moved to ban the procedure completely.

South Carolina’s original six-week ban took effect when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, but the state Supreme Court put it on hold that summer to examine whether it violated the state constitution’s privacy protections, eventually ruling it unconstitutional. So abortion remained legal for the first 5½ months of pregnancy for much of 2022 and 2023.

During that period, South Carolina saw a dramatic uptick in women coming from other states with strict abortion bans like Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee to receive abortions. More abortions were performed in South Carolina in the first eight months of 2023 than in any of the last four full years.

Those trends prompted antiabortion politicians to agonize that the state was becoming an “abortion destination state.”

That changed after the ban went into effect.

Even when compared to before Roe fell, the drop in abortions since the six-week ban was implemented is stark. For instance, compared to 2021, the average number of abortions performed each month is down about 64 percent since the ban took effect, according to DHEC data.

Just under a quarter of women don’t know they’re pregnant until at least seven weeks of pregnancy, according to a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

The data received a muted response among leaders of the state’s anti-abortion movement.

“I don’t think we’ll have a good handle on the data until we have the 2024 numbers,” said Holly Gatling, the executive director of South Carolina Citizens for Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group. “I am cautiously optimistic we’ll see a great number of lives saved when we have those numbers.”

The data illustrate the need for further restrictions, said state Rep. John McCravy, an Anderson Republican who is one of the leading anti-abortion voices in the Statehouse.

“Even though we’ve done well by passing the Heartbeat Bill, even though that has reduced a lot of abortions, we’re still having way too many,” he said.

McCravy repeated his commitment to make a third attempt at passing a total abortion ban at conception with limited exceptions in 2025.

The path to total ban became much clearer Tuesday as GOP voters ousted state Sens. Sandy Senn, of Charleston, and Penry Gustafson, of Camden, in favor of male candidates who support the ban at conception, which was unable to clear a Senate filibuster by two votes last year.

A May Winthrop University poll of South Carolina adults found that 48 percent of respondents opposed the six-week abortion ban, while 36 percent supported it.

There are exceptions to the state’s current ban that allow abortions to be performed in cases of rape or incest up to 12 weeks and later in the case of fatal fetal anomalies or pregnancy-related conditions that threaten the life of the mother.

In the last four months of 2023 when the ban was in effect, 13 abortions were performed after the six-week mark when an embryo’s cardiac activity was detected, which is the law’s technical cutoff point. That means the law’s exceptions are rarely used.

The exceptions, Ringer said, “just don’t work.”

There are likely many abortions occurring in South Carolina that aren’t picked up by the state data due to the rise of medication abortion, Ringer said. It is not against the law for South Carolina women to order abortion pills, often mifepristone, from an online pharmacy and have it shipped to South Carolina so that they can terminate their own pregnancy even after the six-week cutoff.

“We’d have no idea that it occurred,” Ringer said. “And just by word of mouth, I’ve heard of many women who have ordered those pills even when they’re not pregnant to have them on hand.”

Though Planned Parenthood advises patients not to go around the medical system, ordering mifepristone and “self-managing” a medication abortion is generally safe as long as people ensure the online pharmacy is reputable, Ringer said.