There are no women currently serving in the South Carolina State Senate. Just 17 of the 124 members of the SC House of Representatives is a woman. Nationwide, South Carolina ranks dead last in the number of women represented in state government. Women make up half the population of this state and our lack of elected representation in state government is catastrophic. Because there are no women to participate in the political debate, the predominantly older white males representing us seem to have a developed a rather unhealthy obsession with preventing access to preventative and routine reproductive medical care. South Carolina currently ranks number two in the nation in the number of cases of gonorrhea, number three nationally for Chlamydia and number eight for pregnancy among 15 to 19 year olds. The CDC has labeled South Carolina a “hot spot” for HIV infection, the state consistently ranks in the two ten in the nation for per capita HIV/AIDS infection rates.

South Carolinians are contracting and sometimes dying of preventable diseases because South Carolina lacks the political will to mandate solutions. The most recent example of the South Carolina’s unhealthy obsession with abortion regulations came this week with debate over a bill sponsored by Spartanburg Republican Senator Lee Bright that would vest the right to live under the state’s Constitution to a fetus upon conception. Tim Smith of The Greenville News covered the hour long debate in the “all male chamber.” Smith reports that the bill was eventually tabled after critics argued that the move would invite an expensive lawsuit that the state would not win.

There are only three places in South Carolina to obtain a legal abortion, Charleston, Greenville and Columbia. The constitutionally approved, legal procedure isn’t an easy or affordable process to negotiate especially for poor women who live in the more remote locations of our state. The issue of abortion restrictions is discussed, debated and amended almost non-stop year after year by our white male dominated legislature. Meanwhile the numbers of children contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket. These men seem obsessed with the end result of unprotected sex but seem nearly oblivious to the preventative solutions to the problem. Don’t’ even try to convince me that if women weren’t in those chambers in a number reflective of the demographics of the state that the agenda of our legislature might be more compassionate and diverse in nature. I am personally outraged by the patronizing spirit of many of these bills. These men who have never and will never bear a child or become pregnant presume to paternalistically decide to throw up as many barriers as possible to abortion under the assumption that women clearly just need the facts to change their minds. Most women understand that the decision to have an abortion is life changing and traumatic, not done on a whim with little thought. I wish that these men would put as much time and attention into fortifying the barriers to gun ownership in our state as they have with abortion regulation.

South Carolina has a multitude of real problems, unemployment, economic stagnation, an unjust taxation structure, inequitable public schools, domestic violence, illiteracy, an unacceptably high rate of high school drop outs the list goes on. One of the problems we certainly don’t have is an accessible, low-cost and inviting process to obtain an abortion.