Why Republicans Keep Failing To Pass Abortion Bans – By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (FiveThirtyEight) / Sept 12, 2022
Republican legislators have been waiting for years to ban abortion. But now that their moment is here, they can’t agree about what to do with it.
The latest round of this drama just played out in the South Carolina Legislature, where Republicans spent two weeks debating a full ban on abortion in the state — only to deadlock on the details.
A full ban didn’t seem like it would be an especially hard sell, at least in theory. South Carolina is a red state, with a partisan lean of R+18.6. And when the bill was introduced, most Republicans in the conservative legislature, where they outnumber Democrats nearly 2-to-1, seemed to support the general concept of banning abortion.
But they quickly splintered over the details. A group of Republicans introduced a bill that banned abortion without exceptions for rape, incest and lethal fetal abnormalities, but that failed after a day of pleading and accusations on the House floor. A bill with a limited set of exceptions passed the House, but those exceptions were then stripped out of the bill as soon as it landed in the state Senate. Just like that, back to square one. Late Thursday night, Senate Republicans still couldn’t agree on what form the bill should take. After a Republican briefly filibustered the full ban, the Senate settled on adding more restrictions to the state’s six-week abortion ban, which is temporarily blocked by the state Supreme Court, and sent the bill back to the House.
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