10/01/2025
South Carolina Citizens for Life Opposes Criminalizing Women Who Have an Abortion
The following statement may be attributed to South Carolina Citizens for Life President Lisa Van Riper.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (Wednesday, October 1, 2025) – In 2022, the overturning of Roe v. Wade returned abortion regulation and policy making back to our elected state and federal legislators. This is a tremendous opportunity for states to create durable policies that can stand the test of time. In seizing that opportunity, however, we must ensure that the laws we advocate to protect unborn children do not harm their mothers.
Our vision is to create a culture in which the unborn child is welcomed into life and protected under law in a way that cares for both the mother and her child and safeguards the right to life of the medically fragile members of our human family.
Incorporated in 1974, South Carolina Citizens for Life has been a vibrant presence in the General Assembly to promote laws that protect the unborn child and pregnant mothers beginning in 1990 with the Parental Consent Act and most recently with the 2023 Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act. (Refer to attached chart.)
Criminalizing women who have an abortion is inconsistent with our decades of work to legally protect both the unborn and the mother.
Pro-lifers understand better than anyone else the desire to punish the purveyors of abortion who act callously and without regard to the dignity of human life. But turning women who have abortions into criminals, as S323 does, is not the way.
Women are also victims of abortion and require our compassion and support, as well as access to counseling and social services in the days, weeks, months, and years following the tragedy and trauma of abortion.
While the sponsors of S323 have been stalwart supporters of South Carolina Citizens for Life’s past efforts to legally protect the sanctity of life of unborn babies, it is troubling that S323 would create a law that:
Subjects post-aborted women to the death penalty.
Creates a chilling effect on the life-saving work of pregnancy care centers by compelling pro-life counselors, including pastors, to testify against post-aborted women.
Supersedes previous pro-life laws of South Carolina.
South Carolina Citizens for Life urges and encourages members of the General Assembly to reject S323 as written and any legislation that criminalizes post-aborted women. Abortion providers are the ones who should be held legally accountable, not women, pregnancy care centers, counselors, and pastors.
Respectfully, we recommend that the Senate reconsider the 2023 Human Life Protection Act (H3774) on which the senators had achieved significant agreement. We also call on the General Assembly to make mifepristone (the Abortion Pill) a controlled substance. Those two laws together would protect almost all unborn children and their mothers from the tragedy and trauma of abortion.
# # #
