South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace votes for anti-abortion bills she criticized

South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace spoke with multiple media outlets in recent days and distanced herself from her party’s assault on abortion rights. Then she voted for the very legislation she had criticized.

The second-term lawmaker calls herself “pro-life” and voted against reproductive freedom 85% of the time during her first year in Congress, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America. But she told reporters on Tuesday that she wants a “centrist direction” on the issue.

“We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week. Millions of women across the board were angry over overturning Roe v. Wade,” she said. “Trying to find a balance between protecting women’s rights and the right to life is gonna be very important. What we’re doing this week is paying lip service to life. Nothing that we’re doing this week on protecting life is ever going to make it through the Senate.”

She said she plans to introduce legislation to move “in the right direction.”

On Wednesday, she said during an appearance on MSNBC:

On this particular issue, I represent a swing district. And what I saw in the general election this year, after overturning Roe v. Wade, the number two issue after inflation — the number one issue after inflation, but the second issue in the district that I have, in South Carolina — was abortion, where the majority of people, men and women, across my district, and, I would gather, probably across the state of South Carolina, didn’t agree with overturning Roe v. Wade.

She framed abortion proposals on the House GOP’s agenda as “messaging bills,” saying, “If we’re gonna be serious about balancing the rights of women and protecting the right to life — I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive — this is probably not the way to start off the week.”

“We should be looking at measures, for example, making sure every woman has access to birth control,” Mace said.

Four hours later, Mace voted with her party for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would criminalize doctors for failing to provide medical care in extremely rare situations in which a fetus survived an attempted abortion.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s senior vice president of policy, Jacqueline Ayers, said in a press release: “The bill is deliberately misleading and offensive to pregnant people and the doctors and nurses who provide their care. It is yet another attempt by anti-abortion politicians to spread misinformation as a means to their warped political end: to ban safe and legal abortion.”

Mace also voted for a nonbinding resolution “condemning the recent attacks on pro-life facilities.”

Democrats opposed the resolution, introducing their own condemning all political violence and noting that the Republicans’ did not condemn violence against pro-choice entities and providers of abortion care.

“This resolution fails to acknowledge decades of well-documented violence against reproductive health care providers in this country,” Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX) said in a speech, “and in failing to do so, it fails us all. I’ve seen that violence firsthand.”

As Mace acknowledged, neither the bill nor the GOP’s resolution is likely to come up for a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.