South Carolina may tighten abortion restrictions. These women are pushing back

Katrina Shealy and Penry Gustafson are on a mission. The former South Carolina state senators are still reconciling their far-right colleagues’ successful effort to oust them in the 2024 election cycle over their records on abortion legislation. Their final straw was having their mics cut while testifying against a current abortion bill that would be the most restrictive ban in the country during an October committee hearing, the women told Salon.

Now the conservatives are hellbent on challenging the politicians who pushed them out over South Carolinians’ reproductive rights.

“Somebody has to stand up and talk,” Shealy told Salon in an interview. “Is it scary in today’s climate to stand up and say what you think? Sure it is, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Gustafson and Shealy are two of the five South Carolina women who comprise the state senate’s “Sister Senators,” the bipartisan coalition that voted against the Palmetto State’s near-total abortion ban in 2023. The group’s numbers have since dwindled to just one sitting senator, in large part due to a series of primary losses during the 2024 election cycle. The politicians told Salon they attribute their defeats to their outspoken opposition to the far-right’s push to restrict abortion in the state. But losing their seats didn’t keep them from using their voices, they said, nor will their former colleagues’ efforts to quiet them as South Carolina stares down an even more regressive abortion ban.

“You will not silence me,” Gustafson said. “These rude people behind us who are booing us will not distract us from what we need to say. And there’s still millions of women counting on us in South Carolina, even though we aren’t in office, to still speak for them.”

Shealy and Gustafson want to fend off Senate Bill 323, which would almost completely ban abortions in South Carolina. In its current state, the bill would establish embryos as legal human persons, eliminate exceptions for rape and incest, and penalize anyone — including physicians — with up to 30 years in prison for providing a pregnant person with information on how to obtain an abortion.

While South Carolina already enforces a restrictive six-week abortion ban and provisions that limits providers, the proposed “Unborn Child Protection Act” would become the nation’s most draconian abortion policy should it pass.

Lawmakers have scheduled a second medical affairs committee hearing to debate the proposal for Tuesday afternoon. Unlike the first session on the legislation on Oct. 1, the committee will not be taking public comment, but abortion rights demonstrators plan to rally outside the statehouse.

The hearing comes just days after a man was shot in the parking lot outside of a Planned Parenthood in Columbia, according to local news organization FitsNews. Witnesses told the outlet that an anti-abortion protester, Mark Baumgartner, shot the individual in an act of self-defense after he approached and accosted Baumgartner. Baumgartner is the founder and executive director of A Moment of Hope, an evangelical Christian “sidewalk ministry” located in the clinic’s parking lot that aims to counsel people against abortion and offer resources. A Planned Parenthood volunteer told abortion rights newsletter Abortion, Every Day that Baumgartner is regularly outside the Planned Parenthood and has a history of “aggression with patients.” He also spoke in support of SB 323 during the expert testimony portion of the Oct. 1 hearing.

Gustafson and Shealy warn that the bill would hurt low-income South Carolinians who can’t afford to access care out of state the most. Gustafson, who is anti-abortion in most cases but believes that South Carolina’s policy should be less restrictive, called SB 323 “abhorrent” in its striking of exceptions and elimination of judicial bypass, a legal pathway that allows a court to override parental consent for a minor to obtain abortion care. Ideally, Gustafson said, they would want to see abortions permitted up to 12 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies and multi-fetal pregnancy reduction.

The ex-senators failed to convince their fellow state lawmakers, most of whom are men and Republican, while in office that the six-week ban passed in 2023 was too restrictive. They did, however, succeed in beating back other legislation from a separate near-total abortion ban introduced in 2023, House Bill 3774, to previous iterations of SB 323 introduced by primary bill sponsor Sen. Richard Cash and others over the years.

Their spilt from the party’s standpoint on abortion didn’t come without consequence. Both Gustafson and Shealy were censured by their county Republican parties over their votes against the abortion ban in 2023. They, along with former Republican state Sen. Sandy Senn, faced stiff primary challenges in the 2024 election cycle and ultimately lost as South Carolina Republicans worked to oust them. Gustafson told a local news outlet after her defeat that she had been called a “RINO,” or “Republican in name only,” a “baby killer” and “flip-flopper” for her votes against abortion bans.

Shealy told Salon that people have slashed her tires, shot out the windows of her home and thrown images of dismembered fetuses at her over her votes against strict abortion bans. Billboards calling her a “baby killer” popped up across her district during the 2024 cycle, spawning questions from her grandchildren who saw them, she said.

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The rightward lurch of her state’s GOP, Shealy said, pushed her out of the party altogether. Disgraced South Carolina Freedom Caucus leader and former Rep. RJ May’s September guilty plea to five counts of distributing child sexual abuse videos has made her feel more firm in her separation from the party.

Still, the pushback the former lawmakers faced hasn’t stopped them, and their determination hasn’t dissuaded male senators like Cash and co-sponsors Sens. Billy Garrett and Rex Rice from pushing such legislation either.

“I know these men, and they’re not going to stop till they think they can get what they want,” said Shealy, who feels the state’s Republican Party has abandoned her over her stance.

“Nobody in there is a physician,” she added, referencing the more than 40 men who comprise the Senate. “The closest thing we’ve got is a pharmacist, and I’ll be damned if I want him messing with my vagina, as Sandy Senn would say so eloquently.”

The state legislature’s medical affairs committee’s first hearing on the bill last month saw hundreds of South Carolinians gathered to testify and bear witness.

That the majority of the South Carolinians in attendance that Wednesday were against the legislation was clear, Shealy said, recalling that the line to enter the room went outside the statehouse and around the building. Hundreds of people signed up before the session to speak out in opposition to the bill, while just dozens came to speak in support of it.

Shealy told Salon she was assigned number 287 but arranged a swap with a woman assigned number 23 ahead of time so she could speak. Gustafson, originally 343rd on the list, asked to trade spots with another speaker as she approached the lectern. Shealy spoke of the detriment the bill would have to South Carolinians and their doctors, while Gustafson’s testimony urged legislators to vote their conscience rather than party expectations.

Both say that Chairman Cash should have allowed them to exercise their senatorial courtesy to speak outside of public comment and reasonably exceed the two-minute limit. They also took great offense to the committee cutting Gustafson’s mic and sending security to escort them back to their seats, interrupting the remarks they were just a few sentences away from finishing.

“It was extremely shocking and disgraceful, frankly, to not only not enable us to speak — first would be appropriate — but to limit us to two minutes so strictly that they turned off our microphone,” said Gustafson, who briefly exited the room before reentering, believing that security would be removing her from the hearing altogether. “It’s just unheard of … The chairman should be ashamed of the way he treated us.”

Cash’s move has only emboldened them. Gustafson said that she completed her remarks before protesters who had gathered outside the statehouse during the hourslong hearing. She also said she’s pressed current GOP state lawmakers, like 2026 congressional candidate and Republican state Sen. Wes Climer, about whether they back the bill and its elimination of exceptions and judicial bypass.

Cash and Climer did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment.

“There is no justification for this legislation,” Gustafson said. “Any Republican who tries to sit on the fence on this one, they’re going to lose because there’s no gray area here. You either support the exceptions or you don’t.”

Shealy has taken to her blog and Facebook posts to rally against the bill and spread awareness, with hopes that more South Carolinians will push lawmakers to either listen to constituents or lose their seats.

“My goal is now to make sure that they lose their seat, and we put somebody in there that has a brain,” Shealy said.

“It’s going to be my mission that the people of Anderson County, which is where [Cash is] from, know what he’s done for them, which is nothing,” she added. “If they want anything other than an abortion bill happening in Anderson County, they need to start fighting for it and find somebody to represent them.”