A South Carolina legislator who mentioned earlier this month he had misplaced sleep over the implications of a six-week abortion ban he supported simply inexplicably voted to enact a good stricter one.

Rep. Neal Collins (R), who just lately made nationwide headlines when he informed his colleagues he didn’t sleep for per week when he realized {that a} six-week ban he’d helped go final 12 months might result in the deaths of miscarrying sufferers, voted Tuesday evening to go an even stricter abortion ban that outlaws the process in almost all cases at each stage of being pregnant.

In a prolonged Fb publish after the invoice handed within the Home, Collins mentioned he finally determined to help the brand new invoice as a result of it carried an modification giving sufferers 12 weeks to terminate pregnancies ensuing from rape or incest if a physician studies the incidents to legislation enforcement.

“I knew, on the finish, nobody would cheer a nuanced place,” he wrote. “I absolutely perceive the feedback are about to be all unfavorable. … With that, I’m now humbly your punching bag.”

Collins voted for the invoice regardless of the remorse he expressed earlier this month concerning the six-week abortion ban, which went into impact earlier this 12 months. After it handed, he mentioned, a physician confronted him with the case of a teen whose water broke at 15 weeks of being pregnant, destroying fetal viability and placing her life and well being in danger ― a scenario that, in principle, would enable her to terminate the being pregnant beneath South Carolina’s legislation. However as a result of the fetus nonetheless had a heartbeat, the hospital decided it couldn’t legally present her an abortion and despatched her house.

“There’s a 50% probability — better than 50% probability — that she’s going to lose her uterus. There’s a ten% probability that she is going to develop sepsis and herself die,” Collins mentioned of the scenario earlier this month.

That kind of ordeal, medical specialists and activists have lengthy warned, completely encapsulates the issue with utilizing life-saving exceptions to justify abortion bans, and it additional reinforces the necessity for sufferers and their docs to make their very own reproductive well being choices with out legislative interference.

Collins, regardless of the considerations he admitted earlier this month, doesn’t even sound so positive that the brand new invoice he voted to go received’t current the identical dangers to girls’s lives and well-being.

“I hope that we cleared as many unintended penalties as we might,” he informed PBS Newshour on Wednesday when pressed to say if he’s completely positive this legislation received’t hurt girls’s lives.

“This can be a course of,” he continued. “It now goes to an entire separate chamber ― our Senate. Hopefully they are going to digest the language that now we have. They’ve one thing to work with. Hopefully they are going to have medical knowledgeable testimony. I do know that they have already got. I hope that we’re in a position to clear as many prospects as we are able to.”

The 12-week rape and incest exception, which Collins cited because the push he wanted to vote in favor of the ban, can be extraordinarily limiting. Younger, preteen ladies are able to getting pregnant however very probably could not know the indicators of being pregnant earlier than the 12-week mark ― particularly in states like South Carolina that don’t require colleges to show complete intercourse schooling and pressure lecturers to encourage abstinence once they do. Additionally they could wait longer than 12 weeks to pursue abortion care as a result of disgrace, stigma and trauma following rape or incest.

The South Carolina invoice has yet one more procedural vote within the Home earlier than it goes on to hunt approval within the Senate.