COLUMBIA, S.C. — In 2023, South Carolina lawmakers passed several key pieces of legislation that will change the state for years to come. Among those were bills dealing with abortion and bond reform.
The legislature passed a new version of the fetal heartbeat law that essentially bans abortion after six weeks. Senator Katrina Shealy, a Republican lawmaker, said that not everyone was happy with the exemptions that were allowed under the law.
“Fatal fetal anomaly, there’s rape, incest. But that’s not - and the House will never be happy. There are certain people in the House and Senate who will never be happy unless they get that, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, ” Shealy said.
Shealy made national headlines for her opposition to the bill, bucking her party, which was in favor of the restrictions.
“They took away the rights of women in South Carolina, and they criminalized the activity of doctors,” Sen. Brad Hutto, a Democrat from Orangeburg, said.
But the abortion battle didn’t end there; the South Carolina Supreme Court took on the bill to decide whether it was constitutional. In August 2023, the court decided 4-1 to uphold the law.
“South Carolina does not deserve this,” Hutto said.
“There’s a lot of people that are still aren’t happy with it the way it is. And they’ll try and bring it back up this year. This is not the time to do that,” Shealy said.
Another bill that received a lot of attention this year involved bond reform. The law allows judges to sentence repeat offenders up to five additional years in prison on their initial sentence. Hutto said it was necessary to stop the revolving door in jails and prisons.
“Obviously, under the constitution, everybody’s entitled to bond. Just because you’re accused of a crime doesn’t mean you’re guilty, but when you’ve got somebody who is being charged multiple times and getting out multiple times, we’ve decided to heighten the level of scrutiny to whether they can get bond after that second offense,” he said.
Also passed in 2023 was a limited effort to let some students use public money for private schools. The voucher program would only affect 15,000 students. Sen. Mike Fanning said it's unconstitutional.
“We passed the voucher bill that took hundreds of millions of tax dollars, sent them to private schools with no accountability," Fanning said. "Private schools that can reject anyone that they want to. They can reject special needs students simply because they have a disability at a time when we're already underfunding our public schools."
Shealy said parents have the right to choose.
“I think children being able to go to the school of their, you know, where their parents think they can get the best education," she said. "You know, if you have a child with certain special needs that needs to go to a certain school to get a better education, I think that’s an excellent idea."
The NAACP and South Carolina Education Association filed a lawsuit in October, saying the bill is unconstitutional. The state supreme court will consider the law.
But not all bills were as serious, with a ban on the "Carolina Squat" truck trend passing in May. It outlaws vehicles that have their front end raised higher than the back. The ban went into effect Nov. 12. Drivers have until May 10, 2024 to make changes to their cars before being penalized.