Belem, a city in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest region, will host the United Nations’ annual climate change summit in

Robyn Reid was just 15 years old when a doctor fought her down onto a table, ripped off her clothes, tied her arms and legs with restraints and forced her to undergo an abortion against her will. It was 31 January 1996, and the teenager had spent the last three months hiding her pregnancy from her grandparents as she prepared for a new life raising her baby. When they found out, Robyn’s grandmother had driven her from their home in New Jersey to a notorious west Philadelphia clinic nicknamed “Club Abortion”. “I was determined to keep the baby,” Robyn, now 40, tells The Independent. “My plan was to go to the doctor and refuse to have the abortion as I thought ‘no one can make me.’ My 15-year-old brain thought there wasn’t even a chance that would happen to me. “Inside the clinic, I remember being in the room and the doctor walked in and said: ‘Why aren’t you undressed?’ When I told him ‘I’m not having an abortion’, he shouted: ‘I don’t have time for this s***.’ “He then walked out of the room and came back in with my grandmother… Then he started pulling my clothes off.” Robyn, a small 90-pound teenager, fought with all her strength. “I was fighting him as he pulled my clothes off and held me down,” she says. “He was tying my arms down with straps and, then every time he tied my legs down, I managed to pull my arms free. It went on and on like that – it was a physical fight.” In the end, she could fight no more. “He overpowered me to the point that I could no longer move. I remember looking up at the light and saying to myself: ‘Just don’t go to sleep’. Then he gave me a needle,” she says. “The next thing I knew, I woke up 12 hours later and I was back home in New Jersey and was no longer pregnant.” Sobbing, she adds: “I’ll never forget that day.” It would be years before Robyn would learn that she was one of countless women given illegal or dangerous abortions at the hands of a man who some would describe as a “butcher of women”, others as “one of America’s biggest serial killers”. More than 14 years passed before the truth of Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” was finally exposed to the world. ‘House of horrors’ On 18 February 2010, the FBI carried out a raid on the Women’s Medical Society on Lancaster Avenue, west Philadelphia, as part of an investigation into the illegal sale of prescription drugs. On entering the clinic, the federal agents had no idea of the extent of the horrors they would find inside. Semi-conscious and heavily-sedated women lay on dirty recliners and bloodstained blankets moaning in pain. A mix of blood and cat feces covered the floors – the latter from the flea-ridden animals roaming the space where women were undergoing medical procedures. Jars up jars of severed baby feet were stacked inside the refrigerators. By the end of the search, authorities had found 47 aborted fetuses and infants stored at the facility – including one late-term infant frozen inside a water bottle. The dangerous conditions and unspeakable scenes were only the start. In the four decades prior, Gosnell had been running his “house of horrors” clinic in a deprived neighbourhood in west Philadelphia. It was a place where poor, migrant, minority ethnic, and vulnerable women could pay cash to have late-term abortions well after Pennsylvania’s legal limit of 24 weeks. A place for women who – due to poverty, lack of healthcare and other factors driven by inequality – ultimately had nowhere else to turn. Or for women and young girls like Robyn who had their right to choose taken away from them with no questions asked. In many cases, it wasn’t even an abortion clinic - but rather an infanticide clinic where babies were delivered at near-full term and then murdered. While Robyn’s forced abortion was within the legal timeframe in the state of Pennsylvania, countless other women underwent the procedure at Gosnell’s clinic in the seventh, eighth and even ninth month of pregnancy. These babies were delivered alive at full term, breathing and moving. It was then that Gosnell – and sometimes colleagues who had zero medical training – carried out what he called “ensuring fetal demise” by a procedure he named “snipping”. This “procedure” involved sticking a pair of scissors into the back of the newborn baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord, severing the brain from the body. It was murder. As the 2011 grand jury report investigating Gosnell’s actions states: “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.” And for years and years, Gosnell got away with it. ‘Butcher of women’ It’s impossible to know exactly how many babies or women died at Gosnell’s hands. Baby Boy A – as he was referred to in the grand jury report and at trial – was around six pounds when Gosnell induced the labour of his 17-year-old mother at 30 weeks of pregnancy and he was born breathing and moving. Gosnell “snipped” the baby’s spine and dumped him in a shoe box, joking that the baby was so big that he could “walk me to the bus stop”. Baby Boy B was at least in week 28 of pregnancy when he was aborted and his body placed in a one-gallon spring-water bottle and frozen. Baby C lived and breathed for about 20 minutes before one of Gosnell’s workers “snipped” their neck. Baby D was born in a toilet and was moving when they was killed. At least two women are also known to have died. The first woman, Semika Shaw, died of sepsis in 2002 after Gosnell botched the abortion procedure and perforated her uterus. She was 22. The second fatality was Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee from Bhutan who had recently arrived in the US from a resettlement camp and gone to the clinic for an abortion in 2009. She was given an unrecorded amount of the dangerous – but cheap – sedative Demarol. When she stopped breathing, there was no working defibrillator to try to get her heart working again. Instead of immediately calling 911 and performing life-saving measures on Mongar, clinic staff tried to cover up what was happening by staging the scene to appear as though she had been undergoing a safe, legal procedure. By the time she got proper medical attention, it was too late. Her cause of death was found to be an overdose of sedatives. On 15 May 2013 – three years after the FBI raid – Gosnell was finally convicted over some of the deaths and horrifying goings-on at his clinic. He was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Babies A, C and D, involuntary manslaughter in Mongar’s death, 24 counts of performing an abortion beyond the 24-week limit and numerous other charges. He is currently serving three life sentences behind bars in State Correctional Institution Huntingdon. Eight other clinic workers including Gosnell’s wife were also convicted on various charges – some of them of murder. Battle over reproductive rights There’s no doubt that the case of Kermit Gosnell is a real life horror story. But, it’s also a key chapter in the wider story of America’s battle over reproductive rights. For anti-abortion activists, groups and politicians, the case became one of their strongest weapons to push for abortion bans, shorter term limits and tighter restrictions on abortion clinics. Following his arrest, the name Gosnell instantly became fodder for the right to argue that tougher laws and fewer abortion rights was what the country needed. When he introduced a resolution calling for Congress to investigate abortion clinics in 2013, Republican Senator Mike Lee called Gosnell’s case a “wake-up call” for the nation. Texas Governor Rick Perry meanwhile described Gosnell’s case as “the awakening of a sleeping giant in this country to protect babies”. And in many cases, the rhetoric appeared to work. By the time Gosnell was convicted in May 2013, stricter abortion laws had already been rolled out in several states, with Arkansas banning most abortions after 12 weeks and North Dakota after six. Tougher laws were also making their ways through the legislatures of other states including North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio. What Gosnell’s case had done was give the anti-abortion movement “credibility” in its efforts to “demonise” abortion doctors, clinics and – ultimately – abortion rights altogether, says Mary Ziegler, UC Davis Martin Luther King Jr Professor of Law and an expert in the politics of reproduction and healthcare in the US. “His case lent credibility to the anti-abortion arguments of the era,” she tells The Independent. “It wasn’t the case that what he did changed how anti-abortion groups were arguing… Before this case, they were already trying to demonise anti-abortion doctors. But until then, it had been easier to dismiss what they were saying as a political strategy.” For years, the anti-abortion movement had framed abortion as murder and pro-choice advocates as people who supported “killing babies”, despite late-term abortions already being illegal. In Gosnell, the anti-abortion movement for the first time had a real-life figure that they could point to as an example to support this argument. “Kermit Gosnell made it easy for anti-abortion groups to push this narrative,” says Professor Ziegler. “After Kermit Gosnell was discovered, these anti-abortion groups said ‘this is representative of what all abortion doctors are like and of what abortion in general is like’. “Which of course wasn’t true but it made it easier for them to demonise abortion providers more than in the past as they now had a prominent example. This was no longer hypothetical. “So it was framed that, in order to prevent Kermit Gosnell from happening again there was a need to shut down abortion and abortion clinics. The idea that the next Kermit Gosnell could be out there lent credibility to this argument.” She adds: “The movement needed villains to tell the story and in modern history he was the most famous.” The clinic itself became and continues to be used as a physical reminder of the horrors of what went on inside. Indeed in 2019, anti-abortion groups sought to buy the clinic on Lancaster Avenue and turn it into a crisis pregnancy centre, reported local outlet WHYY. The efforts appear to have stalled as four years later the looming building is still owned by Gosnell himself – with the 82-year-old racking up tax bills on the property from prison. There’s also the regular memorials left by anti-abortion advocates at the Laurel Hill Cemetery, which became the burial site of the 47 fetus and infant remains found in the clinic which became known as the “Gosnell babies”. The forgotten stories Meanwhile, what was entirely lost from the story was the women – and why they had ended up at the inhumane clinic on Lancaster Avenue in the first place. The clinic largely served a poor neighbourhood of west Philadelphia with most patients being low-income, migrant or ethnic minority women. They didn’t have access to quality healthcare. Paying cash for what was essentially a backstreet abortion was the only option available to them in their current predicaments. “These were people who were shut out of adequate healthcare and were not able to get what they needed from society,” says Professor Ziegler. “There are gaps in the healthcare system such that some people were so desperate to turn to that – but very quickly that dimension of the Kermit Gosnell story vanished. “It became just that abortion providers are butchers and they’re in it for the money – and this being a story about inequality in America just dropped off… the women were lost from the debate.” Robyn perhaps proves this when she tells The Independent that of the multiple times she has been asked to share her story about what happened to her at Gosnell’s clinic, until now no one has ever asked her where she personally stands in the abortion debate. The experience at Gosnell’s “house of horrors” has left her with complex views. “I think in one way I didn’t have a right to choose – my choice was taken away from me that day. So I don’t want to take that choice away from other women,” she says. “But going through that also made me want to stick with more conservative values as in a world where abortion doesn’t exist this wouldn’t have happened.” She adds: “I am more in support of anti-abortion laws than not… but I also believe in a women’s right to choose… I don’t think they are opposites, you can believe in the right to choose but also in the right to life.” West Philadelphia’s worst kept secret As well as the voices of women like Robyn, something else was also lost from the story of Gosnell’s “house of horrors”: the irony that what he did was already illegal. The reality is that abortion bans would not have stopped Gosnell because he was already knowingly breaking the law. Gosnell knew what he was doing was wrong, but didn’t care. And, disturbingly, it appears that authorities also knew at least in part what was going on as well. Over the years, several complaints had been made about Gosnell and the clinic’s reputation as an “abortion mill” had become the worst kept secret in the city – and yet Gosnell continued to work unchecked for decades. When Gosnell’s clinic – and what went on inside – became national news in 2010, one of the biggest questions asked was, how he had gotten away with it? The findings of the grand jury report revealed a disturbing lack of enforcement and willingness to turn a blind eye by multiple government agencies. Pennsylvania’s Department of Health, which was responsible for auditing the clinic, had information which should have led to its shutdown but it failed to act, the grand jury found. In 1993, the agency had stopped carrying out inspections at abortion clinics – a move the grand jury report blamed on “political reasons” when the pro-choice Republican Governor Tom Ridge took office. Yet, even though the inspections stopped, the alarm was still raised through several complaints sent to the department from other medical centres, from lawyers representing women, and even from an insurance company representing the 22-year-old victim who died on his operating table. The grand jury report outlines one principle reason for why the issues were ignored time and again. “Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more,” it reads. “We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.” Historically, Black and Hispanic women face greater barriers to access to all aspects of reproductive healthcare. Hispanic and Black women face a disproportionately higher risk of unintended pregnancy, according to research in Contraception and Reproductive Medicine journal. Black women make up 40 per cent of abortion patients – the largest share of all ethnic groups – while also having a maternal mortality rate 2.6 times higher than white women, CDC data shows. Several other systemic barriers also often exist, such as lack of heath insurance, lower income to afford quality healthcare – not to mention longstanding discrimination in the healthcare industry towards Black women. The role that race and inequality played is something that’s not lost on Robyn, who is Black but grew up in a white, suburban middle-class neighbourhood. “One of the things it’s put in perspective for me is how, being a Black person, it seems like our abortions are not as important,” she says. “I am Black but grew up in a white neighbourhood and there were always protests outside the abortion clinics there. “There was no one protesting outside Gosnell’s clinic. That makes me a little angry like ‘where were you guys when the doctor violated me?’ “It’s a bit like no one cares if you go and have an abortion in the slums but not here in our nice white neighbourhood.” Now she is older and Gosnell’s crimes have come to light, Robyn says she believes it was Gosnell’s reputation which caused her grandmother to take her there. “I lived in New Jersey where there were multiple abortion clinics. I think he was purposely chosen because he had a bad reputation that if you went there any hour of the day, no matter how far along or in what circumstances he would get the job done,” she says. The grand jury report revealed that – while the clinic was depraved all round – women of colour were subjected to worse treatment than white women at Gosnell’s clinic. While white women were taken to the one clean room in the building, women of colour would be taken to filthy rooms, according to testimony from a former employee. “I do wonder if I was a white person might there have been more concern?” questions Robyn. And yet – as this month marks ten years on from Gosnell’s conviction – the biggest impact of the case is still its use as a tool to try to crack down on abortion access. Kermit Gosnells in a post-Roe world While it’s impossible to know what weight Gosnell’s crimes had on the overturning of Roe v Wade, Professor Ziegler says the same strategy of “demonising” abortion doctors and clinics is still very much alive and well today. Pointing to North Carolina’s latest abortion law – a 12-week ban on almost all procedures in the state – she says “you can see a lot of the same elements now” in the language and argument for the ban. “It’s still a leading strategy of the anti-abortion movement to seek restrictions on the clinics… we still see it happening today but in a different context,” she says. The long-term impact of the case in the wider abortion debate can be seen in other ways too. For one, Gosnell’s case took the debate around reproductive rights out of the doctor’s clinic and placed it firmly in the criminal courts. Here was a doctor on trial for the procedures he had performed on women. Now, in a post-Roe world, doctors are faced with the threat of criminal charges as they struggle to navigate new laws – many of which have created uncertainty about the legality of procedures even where women have miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. That said, the demon doctor narrative is becoming harder for the anti-abortion movement to use to justify tighter regulations and outright bans, says Professor Ziegler. In the months since Roe v Wade was overturned, Republican-led states have passed increasingly restrictive abortion bans and pushed back access to abortion for millions of Americans. With abortion severely restricted or banned in some states, it’s hard to argue for even more restrictions. Also, when around half of all abortions in the US are now medication abortions – telehealth – the “demon doctor” narrative also doesn’t fit the mold. “The demon doctor idea doesn’t work as well today as people have more active roles and more autonomy in their abortions,” explains Professor Ziegler. “And also there are now a lot of places where abortion is a crime so doctors aren’t performing them. “So what’s happening is that women are having miscarriages or need emergency treatment and if a doctor tries to deliver care they risk going to prison – those are the stories we’re hearing now so the Kermit Gosnell story doesn’t fit.” Rather than abortion bans and restrictions preventing a Kermit Gosnell case from ever happening again, the fear is that it will actually lead to a world where more Kermit Gosnells come to exist. With some lawmakers banning almost all abortions in their states – and some also banning out-of-state travel for abortions – underground, backstreet abortions may become the reality in lieu of legal, safe options. And women may have no other option other than turning to the next Kermit Gosnell. “Even when abortion was legal, you had butchers like Kermit Gosnell,” says Professor Ziegler. “Now there’s the fear that people will be forced into unsafe situations in places where abortion is a crime. It’s not just abortions it’s also ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages and people will be more likely to return to people like Kermit Gosnell if they can’t access healthcare.” Professor Ziegler points out that while healthcare and abortion providers and groups have worked to ensure women in states with bans aren’t cut off from treatment – through medication access or travel funds – the now confusing and ever-changing laws mean people will struggle to navigate legality and know what they can and cannot do within the law. “Wherever abortion is criminalised or where people don’t have easy access to abortion, there’s the risk of more dangerous abortions happening,” she says. “Where you don’t have easy access to get out of state for an abortion or when you’re unsure what the law is, I would expect to see more dangerous abortions happening. “Women left resorting to doing dangerous things on their own – and to turning to more people like Kermit Gosnell.” Read More South Carolina enacts six-week abortion ban, threatening access across entire South Indiana doctor faces discipline hearing over 10-year-old Ohio girl's abortion Pending abortion restrictions strain providers in US Southeast Doctor who provided abortion care to 10-year-old rape survivor reprimanded in case that drew national scrutiny Judge halts South Carolina’s new stricter abortion law until state Supreme Court review DeSantis wants to model America after Florida. Civil rights groups are sounding the alarm on his ‘hostile’ agenda

The day after the state’s Republican governor signed the ban into law, a judge in South Carolina has blocked a measure outlawing abortion at roughly six weeks of pregnancy. Abortion rights advocates and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit moments after Governor Henry McMaster announced his signature on the bill. South Carolina’s latest law – which could extend the sweeping restrictions and outright bans on abortion care across the entire US South, and threaten legal access to care for millions of Americans – is nearly identical to a bill that was blocked by the state Supreme Court last year. The decision on Friday means the state’s abortion regulations revert to previous rules that allow for abortion care up until about 20 weeks after after fertilization. “The status quo should be maintained until the Supreme Court reviews its decision,” Judge Clifton Newman said. “It’s going to end up there.” His decision on 26 May comes just four months after the state’s Supreme Court permanently struck down a similar measure, which the court determined ran afoul of the state’s constitution. Restrictions on abortion care “must be reasonable and it must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy,” Justice Kaye Hearn wrote in the majority opinion on 5 January. More than a dozen states, mostly in the South, have outlawed most abortions or severely restricted access within the year after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which revoked a constitutional right to abortion care that was affirmed by the decision in Roe v Wade for nearly half a century. South Carolina remains the only state south of Virginia without severe restrictions or outright bans on abortion care past the 12th week of pregnancy. Most of those states have moved to ban abortion in nearly all cases with limited or no exceptions. Last year, lawmakers in South Carolina failed to adopt an anti-abortion law that would ban nearly all abortions in the state, but a six-week ban took effect shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling on 24 June. In a statement following the governor’s signature on the latest six-week ban, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lambasted Republican lawmakers who are “dismantling women’s rights across the South, putting their health and lives in jeopardy. “ South Carolina’s ban will cut off access to abortion for women in the state and those across the entire region for whom South Carolina is their closest option for care,” she added. This is a developing story Read More North Carolina Republicans approve 12-week abortion ban as sweeping restrictions spread across US South Senator who voted for anti-trans bill that passed by one vote admits she wasn’t paying attention From the Civil War to today's mattress sales, Memorial Day is full of contradiction GOP leaders in Kansas back off threat to sue Democratic governor over education funding DeSantis pushes past embarrassing campaign start, outlines travel schedule for early state visits

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa allocated a range of powers to his electricity minister to help address the

A Florida woman whose complaints led to school restrictions for a poem read at Joe Biden’s inauguration appears to have ties to several far-right groups, including the Ron DeSantis-supported Moms for Liberty and neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys. In a complaint requesting that her child’s school remove the books entirely, Daily Salinas claimed that The Hill We Climb – Amanda Gorman’s book-length version of the poem she read at the president’s inauguration ceremony – and several other titles contained references to critical race theory, gender ideology, “indirect hate messages,” and “indoctrination,” especially of socialism, according to documents shared by the Florida Freedom to Read Project. Her complaint prompted the school to restrict access to the book, along with The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids and Love to Langston. A school committee moved the books to the library’s middle school section, despite the books being recommended for younger readers. Ms Salinas told the Miami-Herald that she “is not for eliminating or censoring any books” but wants materials to be appropriate and for students “to know the truth” about Cuba. But she appears to have connections with or has expressed support for several far-right groups that have promoted sweeping restrictions against LGBT+ people and honest discussions of race and racism, according to a review of her social media history and online activity from Miami Against Fascism and The Daily Beast. In August 2021, she was photographed alongside Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio during a protest against Covid-19 protections in Miami-Dade schools. The following year, while wearing a Ron DeSantis T-shirt, she attended another rally organised by Proud Boys to support far-right activist Christoper Monzon, a 2017 “Unite the Right” rally attendee who was allegedly beaten while canvassing for Republican Senator Marco Rubio last year. Ms Salinas also was photographed posing with Mr Monzon and a small group of his supporters after his release from hospital. That same year, Ms Salinas also worked as a volunteer for the governor’s “Education Agenda Tour,” which promoted right-wing candidates in school board elections as part of his efforts to upend the state’s education system. Video from a Miami-Dade school board meeting in July 2022 appears to show Ms Salinas with the group Moms for Liberty disrupting the hearing to protest sex education textbooks that had previously been approved by the board. Footage shows police forcibly removing her from the meeting. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that emerged from protests over Covid-19 guidelines, has offered so-called bounties for reporting teachers who allegedly discuss “divisive topics” in schools, attacked The Trevor Project for supporting young LGBT+ people at risk of suicide, and launched a barrage of book challenges. The group has also won praise from Mr DeSantis, who appointed one of its members to a board that now controls properties operated by the Walt Disney Company for its massive Orlando park campus. The Independent has requested comment from the group’s Miami-Dade chapter. A review of Ms Salinas’ social media history includes a Facebook post calling the Proud Boys “los mejores”, or “the best.” “My Proud Boys,” she wrote in the post on April 2021, above a photo of Tarrio with other members of the group. In March of this year, she shared a Facebook post promoting the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fraudulent century-old piece of antisemitic propaganda. Ms Salinas appeared to have deleted the post after it was flagged by Miami Against Fascism on Twitter. She then posted an image of an Israeli Defense Force soldier with a caption reading: “People never seen this. I love my Jewish people.” “I want to apologize to the Jewish community,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on 24 May. “I’m not what the post says,” she added. “I love the Jewish community.” She also co-hosted a Spanish-language podcast – “Hablando Como Los Locos” – that published an episode with the caption “Learn more about Kanye West, his polemic, his message” on 5 December 2022. Four days earlier, the rapper appeared on Alex Jones’s InfoWars and praised Adolf Hitler. The Independent has requested comment from Ms Salinas. Mr DeSantis – who has entered the race for the 2024 Republican nomination for president – has ushered through sweeping laws to control public school education and lessons and speech he deems to be objectionable while characterising reporting on the impacts of such policies as a “hoax” and a “fake narrative” manufactured by the press. The state is at the centre of a nationwide trend of challenges against books and materials in libraries and schools, while the governor continues to falsely insist that no books have been banned as he launches his 2024 campaign. A trio of state laws enacted within the last school year include what opponents have called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in all school grades, and laws that restrict discussions of race or racism, and mandate how schools catalog books on their shelves. Taken together, teachers and schools have been forced to remove materials out of fear of facing legal action without clear guidance, or have faced an increase in threats and challenges from activists emboldened by legislation. Last week, Penguin Random House and several prominent authors and families filed a federal lawsuit against a school district where activists have challenged dozens of books, largely involving or written by people of colour or LGBT+ people. In Escambia County alone, nearly 200 books have been challenged, at least 10 books have been removed by the school board, five books were removed by district committees, and 139 books require parental permission, according to an analysis from free expression group PEN America. In Florida’s Clay County, at least 100 books were pulled off shelves after challenges from a single person, PEN America found. Read More Amanda Gorman ‘gutted’ after poem banned at Florida school The book ban surge gripping America’s schools and libraries The school librarian in the middle of Louisiana’s war on libraries

The state of South Carolina has outlawed abortion at roughly six weeks of pregnancy, extending the sweeping restrictions and outright bans on abortion care across the entire US South, and threatening legal access to care for millions of Americans. Republican Governor Henry McMaster signed legislation into law on 25 May after the bill’s final passage earlier this week. It goes into effect immediately. Republican lawmakers in neighbouring North Carolina recently voted to override the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill outlawing abortion at 12 weeks of pregnancy, restricting abortion access in a state that has been a haven for abortion care in the year after the US Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v Wade. More than a dozen states, mostly in the South, have outlawed most abortions or severely restricted access within the year after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which revoked a constitutional right to abortion care that was affirmed for nearly half a century. Abortion rights restrictions in North Carolina and a six-week ban in South Carolina dramatically change the map for abortion access in the US, where abortions are banned in most cases from Texas to West Virginia and along the Gulf Coast, making legal access to care out of reach altogether across the Deep South. Abortion rights advocates and civil rights groups have filed a lawsuit to challenge South Carolina’s law in court. The lawsuit comes just four months after the state’s Supreme Court permanently struck down a nearly identical law, which the court determined ran afoul of the state’s constitution. Restrictions on abortion care “must be reasonable and it must be meaningful in that the time frames imposed must afford a woman sufficient time to determine she is pregnant and to take reasonable steps to terminate that pregnancy,” Justice Kaye Hearn wrote in the majority opinion on 5 January. “Six weeks is, quite simply, not a reasonable period of time for these two things to occur,” the judge added. Jenny Black, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, said in a statement that South Carolina lawmakers “have once again trampled on our right to make private health care decisions, ignoring warnings from health care providers and precedent set by the state’s highest court just a few months ago.” “The decision of if, when, and how to have a child is deeply personal, and politicians making that decision for anyone else is government overreach of the highest order,” she added. “We will always fight for our patients’ ability to make their own decisions about their bodies and access the health care they need. We urge the court to take swift action to block this dangerous ban on abortion.” Governor McMcaster has pledged to defend the law in court. “We stand ready to defend this legislation against any challenges and are confident we will succeed,” he said in a statement. “The right to life must be preserved, and we will do everything we can to protect it.” Read More Mother forced to give birth to stillborn son joins lawsuit against Texas abortion ban Senator who voted for anti-trans bill that passed by one vote admits she wasn’t paying attention Twitter's launch of DeSantis' presidential bid underscores platform's rightward shift under Musk Timeline: How Georgia and South Carolina nuclear reactors ran so far off course Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost

“I prefer to stay out of politics." Those were Elon Musk’s words when forced in September 2021 to respond to a claim by Texas governor Greg Abbott that he supported the state’s anti-abortion laws. If he really does prefer to stay out of politics, however, Musk has a funny way of showing it. Over his many years of fame as the chief executive of Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter, the South African-born tycoon has attacked everyone and everything from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders through individual regulatory officials to Covid rules, trade unions, and "pronouns". Since 2022, his public political stances have taken a sharp rightward turn as he declared his support for the Republican Party, aligned himself with far-right activists on Twitter, disparaged transgender rights, embraced conservative conspiracy theories, and pledged to save civilisation from the “woke mind virus”. His activities appear to have earned him the patronage of Florida’s GOP governor Ron DeSantis, who was announcing that he is running for president during a conversation with Musk in Twitter’s audio panel service Spaces on Wednesday 24 May. It is a striking departure from the 51-year-old’s aproach to politics before the Covid pandemic, when he carefully triangulated between left and right and donated to both Democrats and Republicans while variously declaring himself a “moderate”, a “socialist”, and “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. Yet despite evidence to the contrary, Musk still claims to be an independent who is “neither conventionally right nor left” and committed to healthy debate. So what does Elon Musk really believe? And – given that he is both one of the world’s richest people and the owner of one of its largest social networks – what does that mean for the rest of us? Embracing the Republican Party Let’s start with Musk’s recent support for the US Republican Party, which has been clear and unambiguous, if not without caveats. “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division and hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican,” he said in May. This came after months of criticism of President Joe Biden, which included hammering his flagship infrastructure and social spending bills for granting subsidies to the electric car industry and increasing the “insane” federal budget deficit. Musk later called the president a “damp sock puppet in human form”. In June 2022, Musk went further, revealing he had voted for Republican congressional candidate Maya Flores in a special election – the first time, he claimed, that he had ever cast a vote for the GOP. “Massive red wave in 2022,” Musk tweeted, though it was unclear if he meant this as a prediction or a rallying cry. Florida governor Ron DeSantis joked about the South African-born billionaire’s comments: “I’m focused on 2022, but with Elon Musk, what I would say is I welcome support from African Americans. What can I say?” Despite all this, Musk has stopped short of declaring his permanent support for the party as a whole. Following his tweet about the special election, one Twitter user asked: “I assume Republican for president [too]?” “[To be determined],” Musk replied. “What are you leaning towards?” he was asked in a follow-up question. “DeSantis,” he said. Similarly, the mogul’s endorsement of the Republican Party on the day before the US midterms in November 2022 was somewhat qualified. “To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties,” he told his his 115 million Twitter followers. “Therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the presidency is Democratic. Hardcore Democrats or Republicans never vote for the other side, so independent voters are the ones who actually decide who’s in charge!” After the election, Musk added: “To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year. And I’m open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.” A self-proclaimed ‘centrist’ who donates to both paties Musk’s caveats about supporting the GOP echo his longstanding claim to be a “centrist” or an “independent” who does not fit into traditional boxes of left or right. For years, he has offered varying definitions of his own politics. His most consistent theme has been that he is “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”, or even “socially very liberal”. In 2020, he put it this way: “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.” In 2018, he described himself as “a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks”, referring to the late Scottish sci-fi author who wrote longingly (if sceptically) of a space-faring anarcho-socialist civilisation called the Culture, which has no money, no poverty, no wage labour, no police, no prisons, no standing army, and nearly infinite abundance of basic goods. At another point Musk claimed to be a “socialist”, but “not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive”. He later said we should not take what he’d said too seriously. In April 2021, he posted a stick figure cartoon on Twitter that depicted political moderates, including himself, standing still on the political spectrum while the left accelerates away into extremism, dragging the centre ground away and making moderates appear right-wing by comparison. The following November, he professed himself “neither conventionally right nor left”, and in December remarked: "You know Twitter is being fair when extremists on far right and far left are simultaneously upset!" Musk’s political donations offer some support for this. According to data gathered by the non-profit lobbying watchdog Open Secrets, Elon Musk has given a total of $1.2m to politicians, parties, political action committees (PACs), and referendum campaigns since 2002. That money went almost equally to Democrats, with $542,000, and Republicans, with $574,500, with another $85,000 going to two broadly left-wing referendum campaigns in California. The balance has fluctuated over the years: in 2006, 2013 and 2017 he donated overwhelmingly to Republicans, while in 2015 he gave exclusively to Democrats. He has also given a total of $30,000 to a PAC set up by SpaceX, which donated 54 per cent of its total to Democrats and 46 per cent to Republicans. Many of the individual politicians he gave to were state legislators in California, where Tesla was formerly based, and Texas, where SpaceX has long maintained rocket testing and launch facilities. Musk donated to more individual Democratic politicians than to Republicans, and often praised specific Democrats in a way he has rarely done with their opponents. Way back in 2005, he gave $10,000 to California’s Proposition 82, a proposal to increase taxes on the rich to pay for universal pre-school for four-year-olds, although it did not pass. When Donald Trump was a candidate for the Republican nomination, Musk said of him: “I feel a bit stronger that he is probably not the right guy. He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” Musk says he voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Meanwhile, SpaceX itself has spent about $9.7m on lobbyists and Tesla has spent $5.5m. The former company relies on government contracts for much of its revenue, while the latter is subject to plenty of regulation. "SpaceX's campaign to win political support has been systematic and sophisticated," wrote the Sunlight Foundation in 2013. Musk has described these donations not as a signal of his own personal beliefs but simply as the cost of doing business in America. "In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution," he told the Huffington Post in 2013. All of which helps explain why the first version of this article – back in December 2021 – framed Musk’s political beliefs as elusive and somewhat puzzling. Since then, however, Musk’s own behaviour has made that idea rather outdated. Elon Musk, culture warrior There’s no avoiding the obvious: Musk appears to have been thoroughly red-pilled. Originally drawn from the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, the “the red pill” is a phrase used by white supremacists and anti-feminists to describe the process of being radicalised into their worldview. Musk himself urged his Twitter followers to “take the red pill” in April 2020. It is a neat expression of how far down the culture war “rabbit hole” Musk has burrowed since then. He has described “wokeness” as a “mind virus” that poses a “mortal threat to civilisation”, declaring: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.” In a June 2022 interview with The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site, he said: "At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people... a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue." In a similar vein, he mocked Twitter’s adoption in 2016 of “Stay Woke” T-shirts inspired by the 2014 Ferguson protests against police racism, claiming that the protesters’ “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan was “made up” and that “the whole thing was a fiction”. The US Justice Department did indeed clear the officer who shot Michael Brown, but also concluded that Ferguson police had “routinely” violated citizens’ constitutional rights and discriminated against Black people. Texas governor Greg Abbott, to whom Musk donated $10,000 in 2014, has claimed that Musk “likes the social policies” of his state, which include banning almost all abortion and defining transgender healthcare for under-18s as “child abuse”. Musk rebuffed him, but ambiguously and mildly, with nothing like the fire and brimstone he has mustered against trade unions or tax proposals. Musk has also boosted right-wing conspiracy theories, claiming that health tsar Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted and sharing a groundless claim about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband from a website with a history of fake news. As a homophobic hate campaign began to gather steam against one of his former employees, Yoel Roth, Musk weighed in to groundlessly imply that Roth was an enabler of child abuse. Roth subsequently suffered a torrent of abuse and threats that reportedly forced him to leave his home. That incident echoed the US right’s growing penchant for smearing political opponents, and particularly LGBT+ people, as paedophiles or “groomers”. According to the left-wing think tank Media Matters, some members of the quasi-fascist QAnon movement – which helped popularise child abuse smears as a political tactic – are convinced that Musk is one of them, albeit based on shaky evidence. On Twitter, Musk regularly interacts on friendly terms with far-right activists who traffic in hoax claims about the 2020 US election and hate speech about minority groups, sometimes soliciting their advice about how to run the site or chiming in to agree with their tweets. Perhaps this could be explained as a commitment to maintaining open discussion across political divides – except it’s hard to name any left-wingers with whom he is so pally. Musk has shown a particular antipathy to Covid lockdowns, which he once described as "fascist". He declared early in the pandemic that "the coronavirus panic is dumb" and wrongly predicted that the virus would be gone from America by the end of April 2020. He has also consistently singled out transgender people in his critiques of “wokeness”. While he has claimed to “absolutely support” trans people, he scorns the idea that anyone should be expected to use the correct pronouns when referring to them, which most trans people view as a basic act of respect that is necessary for their equal participation in society. “Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracising those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone,” Musk said in December 2022. He has previously declared that “pronouns suck” and tweeted a meme likening cisgender people who state their pronouns on their Twitter profiles to oppressive Redcoats in colonial America. Before buying Twitter, he railed against the social network’s rules on anti-trans hate speech, which forbid users from intentionally referring to specific trans people by their birth sex (known as misgendering) or by old names they have renounced (known as deadnaming). As chief executive, Musk has reportedly made reviewing that policy a top priority. And, just after Christmas 2022, Musk liked a tweet by Libs of TikTok, a conservative Twitter account that has been accused of encouraging violence and harassment against LGBT+ people, that appeared to characterise educating children about LGBT+ issues as “confusing kids about their identity” and “stealing childhood innocence” while describing transition healthcare as “sterilising and mutilating kids”. Critics have suggested that this rhetoric may be related to Musk’s estrangement from his trans daughter, who has legally renounced his surname and said that she does not want to be related to him “in any way, shape or form.” Musk has blamed “neo-Marxists” at her university for turning her against him. Others have raised eyebrows at the fact that Musk’s former girlfriend, the electronic musician Grimes, is now in a relationship with a trans woman. All in all, it’s hard to reconcile Musk’s actions in 2022 with his claims of centrism. Nor does his alliance with pro-Trump outrage merchants say much for his once-vaunted “social liberalism”, which previously led him to favour “direct democracy” over representative democracy and advocate for the release of people imprisoned for cannabis offences. Pro-capitalist and anti-union Social policies notwithstanding, Musk remains an ardent free-marketeer who is deeply skeptical of government interventions in business. That was the basis of his attack on President Biden's Build Back Better Act in December 2021, saying the bill's tax rebate of up to $12,500 for people who buy electric cars is an "unnecessary" handout for an industry that is already taking off. He backed that up with a revealing philosophical argument about the difference between corporations and nation states. "It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation," he said, meaning business leaders, "and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government. Government is simply the biggest corporation, with a monopoly on violence – and where you have no recourse. So how much money do you want to give that entity?" This libertarian-style thinking is fairly consistent for Musk. He has strongly opposed trade unions, especially in his own companies, as a barrier to efficient operations, and skirmished repeatedly with Bernie Sanders over the Vermont senator’s proposals for an income tax on billionaires. He claimed in October that Biden "seems to be controlled by unions" and in 2018 tweeted that Tesla employees who attempted to unionise would lose their stock options, which regulators have claimed was illegal. When he does endorse government intervention, Musk tends to favour measures that minimise government bureaucracy. Rather than subsidies for green industries, for example, he wants a carbon tax, and says he lobbied the Biden administration to create one. His argument is that the price of fossil fuels doesn't properly reflect their cost to the environment, meaning companies are basing their decisions on false information. Taxing carbon would correct that balance, allowing the free market to figure out in its own way how best to cut their emissions. That said, none of this stopped him from accepting billions of dollars in government subsidies for both Tesla and SpaceX. Similarly, Musk has long argued for a universal basic income to support human workers whose jobs, he believes, will soon be replaced with artificial intelligence (AI). In some ways that's a pretty left-wing idea, since it would involve spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money. But it has also been favoured by some conservatives such as Richard Nixon and free market economists such as Milton Friedman, both of whom felt it would prevent government bureaucrats deciding who deserves benefits and avoid punishing recipients for finding work. Green power has often been Musk's red line Another point of consistency has been global warming and clean energy. Back in 2006, Musk gave one of his biggest ever single donations – $75,000 – to Proposition 87, a California referendum campaign to impose a special tax on fossil fuel extractors. Since then, emissions have often been his red line. In the early years of Donald Trump's presidency, Musk joined a White House advisory council, saying that "the more voices of reason that the president hears, the better". But when Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, Musk quit, saying: "Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world." And when Musk was persuaded to get into Bitcoin – a natural fit, given his libertarian outlook and his penchant for technological solutions for political problems, to say nothing of his fondness for controversy – it was the currency's prodigious carbon emissions that led him to rethink. "Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin," he said in May 2021. "We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel. Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment." Where Musk has supported Biden, that too is connected to the environment. Just after the president’s inauguration, he told Fortune: "I'm super fired up that the new administration is focused on climate... I feel very optimistic about the future of sustainable energy with the new administration." Even in his culture warrior era, Musk has stuck to this particular gun. When conservative activist Tom Fitton claimed in December 2022 that electric cars have “no impact on climate”, Musk responded, curtly: “Yeah they do.” A technocrat with astral ambitions Through all these issues runs one strain of Musk's politics that genuinely does not map onto the traditional political compass: technocracy. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman was the Canadian leader of the original technocratic movement, which believed in replacing both politicians and bankers with whoever had the most expertise. Elon Musk, capitalist extraordinaire, does not exactly take after his grandfather. Like the movement’s founder William Henry Smyth, though, his statements suggest a strong underlying belief that scientists and engineers can solve political problems that are intractable to others. As the historian Jill Lepore has argued, Musk inspires numerous followers with an exotic brand of techno-capitalism that she calls "Muskism". She says that many of its ideas are drawn from science fiction, sometimes very old science fiction, meaning that alongside rockets and cars it is also selling "visions of the future". Musk thinks we may live in a simulation; he regularly references Scottish sci-fi author Iain M Banks; and he is especially preoccupied with the dangers of AI, which he calls "the most serious threat to the survival of the human race". He is worried not only about mass automation of white-collar jobs but also the rise of a theoretical hyper-intelligent AI that is too powerful for humans to restrain. "With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon," he said in 2014. "In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out." Both that and global warming feed into Musk's conviction that colonising other planets – becoming "a multi-planet species" – is crucial to humanity's long-term survival. However seriously you take that, it is clearly an important goal that shapes the rest of his politics. Even his diatribes against the “woke mind virus” – as well as his hostile takevoer of Twitter – are based on the idea that “wokeness” and divisive social networks are a threat to human civilisation. It is a characteristically cosmic rationale for tweeting incessantly about pronouns. Two things are notable here. One is that many of these issues are not very well-known outside the tech industry, and to prioritise them suggests that you believe everyone else is missing a trick. The other is that Musk is not attempting to meet the dangerous future through government action or massive collective institutions like formal movements or trade unions. Instead, he wants to solve it himself, through hierarchical top-down for-profit companies run by him where he decides how to allocate capital. In other words, he is his own kind of technocrat: a talented engineer and huge nerd who thinks engineers and nerds can design better systems of government and economics than currently exist. For evidence, look at Musk’s troubled Hyperloop project, which is trying to build a new form of public transport while eschewing any input from traditional transit experts, who say that he has essentially invented very inefficient buses. (It is also among the beneficiaries of Biden’s infrastructure bill.) WhenTIME magazine named Musk its 2021 Person of the Year, it described him this way: “The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past.” But many of the people who actually lived in that past reviled its industrialists as “robber barons”, and their misdeeds inspired regulations and social policies that are still in place today. That is why Professor Lepore describes Muskism as containing "a lot of feudalism", saying: "It’s like there are these lords and the rest of us are the peasantry and our fates are in their hands because they know best... The presumption that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, [two of the] wealthiest people in the world, get to decide the extraterrestrial fate of humankind is a bizarrely regressive notion." Musk has his own bullish answer to such claims. "To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say: I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship," he said on Saturday Night Live in May 2021. "Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?" This article was originally published on 9 December 2021, and has been regularly updated since then. Read More Elon Musk wants to proceed with $44bn Twitter buyout Zelensky fires back at Elon Musk’s ‘insane’ Twitter poll on Russia Ukraine peace Elon Musk Twitter deal - live: Stock market goes wild as Tesla mogul’s $44bn buyout is accepted Ivanka and Jared split over attending Trump 2024 launch – follow live Why was Donald Trump impeached twice during his first term? Four big lies Trump told during his 2024 presidential announcement

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As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis prepares to announce his official bid for president of the United States, Americans are getting a taste of what a future under Mr DeSantis could look like. For months, Mr DeSantis, 44, has been called a possible frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the media because of his reputation for passing conservative legislation and comfortable re-election to the governor’s mansion. From passing a six-week abortion ban to eliminating concealed carry permits, Mr DeSantis has proven he is willing to pass controversial legislation in the name of uniting the state under right-leaning values. And the Florida governor seems to be hoping for the same if he were to become US president. Here’s what Mr DeSantis has said about the future of the US and what he thinks of certain policies. On abortions Mr DeSantis is anti-abortion, believing “The right to life is the most foundational of our God-given rights.” In April, Mr DeSantis quietly signed Senate Bill 300, known as the “Heartbeat Protection Act”, which prohibits abortions after six weeks of gestation with the exceptions to save a woman’s life, a fatal fetal abnormality or in the event of rape or incest so long as the woman can provide documentation such as a police report. The six-week ban will only go into effect 30 days after the Florida Supreme Court rules on a challenge to the state’s current 15-week ban under House Bill 5 which Mr DeSantis signed into law last year. Should SB 300 go into effect, it would make Florida one of the most restrictive states for women to access reproductive healthcare like abortions. On the Supreme Court While giving a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in May, Mr DeSantis advocated for the Supreme Court to become more conservative by replacing moderate or left-leaning justices with conservative jurists. Citing Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as “the gold standard for jurisprudence”, Mr DeSantis said in the future the court should “fortify” itself with the addition of two like-minded Justices. “It is possible that in those eight years we would have the opportunity to fortify Justices Alito and Thomas, as well as actually make improvements with those others,” Mr DeSantis said. “If you were able to do that then you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter century, so this is big stuff.” On gun control Mr DeSantis is against gun control, having received an A+, the highest rating, from the National Rifle Association (NRA) “Ron DeSantis vigorously opposes gun, magazine and ammunition bans,” the NRA said. In April, Mr DeSantis signed House Bill 543 into law, eliminating the requirement for permits to carry concealed weapons. On LGBT+ Rights The Humans Right Campaign, one of the state’s largest LGBT+ rights advocacy groups, and Equality Florida issued a traveling warning to those in the LGBTQ+ community in May. “While not a blanket recommendation against travel nor a call for boycott, the travel advisory outlines the devastating impacts of laws that are hostile to the LGBTQ community, restrict access to reproductive health care, repeal gun safety policies, foment racial prejudice, and attack public education by banning books and censoring curriculum in order that prospective travelers or residents can make the best decisions for themselves and their families,” the press release said. One of Mr DeSantis’ most controversial legislation, House Bill 1557, involves restricting LGBT+ rights in education. The legislation, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, prohibits classroom education or instruction involving gender identity or sexual orientation. Mr DeSantis has also signed legislation that prohibits transgender people from using public facilities that align with their gender identity and one that prohibits children from attending “adult live performances” like drag shows. On Covid restrictions The Florida governor first made headlines during the pandemic when he emerged as a leader who vehemently opposed Covid-19 protocols like mask mandates, social distancing and vaccine requirements. “Federal vaccine mandates and restrictions were never about protecting Americans from a virus, they were exercising control at the expense of the American economy and the American way of life,” Mr DeSantis said in a press release. Mr DeSantis received harsh criticism from the public for refusing to implement restrictions that were proven to stop the spread of the virus. 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The South Carolina Senate on Tuesday passed a six-week abortion ban despite the fact that every woman senator in the chamber, Republican and Democrat, voted against it. The abortion ban will now go to the desk of Gov Henry McMaster, a Republican. If Mr McMaster does sign the bill as expected, it will be another blow to people seeking abortion care in the southeast. Nearly every other state in the region has enacted abortion bans since the fall of Roe v Wade last year. If Mr McMaster signs the ban into law, it is likely to face a legal challenge. The South Carolina Supreme Court earlier this struck down a previous version of a six-week abortion ban as unconstitutional. But that didn’t stop Republican men in the state legislature and the male Republican governor from pushing to pass a ban anyway. Six-week bans on abortion are considered near total bans because many people don’t know they’re pregnant until more than six weeks after conception. This story will be updated. Read More Haley vs. Scott: From South Carolina allies to 2024 rivals South Carolina Republicans hear pitches from 2024 candidates, reelect state party chairman Republican abortion debate inches toward resolution in South Carolina