January 5, 2024
South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace is back in the headlines again for the same old, same old. One of Biden’s Favorite Republicans is evidently still not happy that the pro-life movement won’t leave her alone. According to an article in Breitbart, Mace stated:
“…We are losing the fight on abortion every single day. We all know that being pro-life, and I’m pro-life, is the compassionate way forward, is the compassionate policy. But we’re losing the fight because we’re not being compassionate to women. We are throwing it back in their face.
“You look at the Texas ruling. That is a very emotional ruling. Most women, the vast majority, agree with the woman whose baby had Trisomy 18. That she should have the option to make a decision, not the state, not bureaucrats on a panel in Texas to decide what to do that’s a very intimate and very painful decision for women.”
As we’ve covered in the past, Mace is optically pro-life for the sake of donor dollars and functionally very similar to weaker, pro-abortion Democrats. She is on record supporting legislation that, in her own words, “is really a symbolic bill, that just brings up that life begins at conception, which is, you know — it doesn’t change any laws, it doesn’t change the Constitution.”
As we also wrote on the Texas case that Mace referenced, ending the life of a current child in hopes of making another one in the future is wrong. From the blog: “If a pregnancy does not cause any life-threatening complications for the mother – as we saw in this Texan case — it’s not morally ethical to commit a procedure which purposefully results in the death of her preborn child.”
In another instance in the article, Mace tries to sidestep the abortion issue entirely, and focuses instead on contraception or that OB-GYN care is limited in some parts of South Carolina. She continued:
“We can’t even talk about contraception. I mean, I can’t even talk about birth control, and if you want to be serious about reducing the number of abortions in this country, we have to have a conversation about how women can have greater access to birth control. People say that’s not really a thing. Well, in my home state of South Carolina, we have 14 [counties] in the entire state that don’t have a single OB/GYN doctor. How are they supposed to get access?”
The lack of enough OB-GYNs in the United States is a real issue (one that has been rearing its ugly head for about ten years now), but when you dig deeper into the facts, Mace’s eternal kryptonite, we see a bit of a different story in South Carolina.
According to reporting from The Post Courier, cross-referenced with local demographic data from South Carolina, the largest county without an OB-GYN provider is Chesterfield County with more than 43,000 people according to the most recent census data. The largest town in that county, Cheraw (just shy of 14,000), is only 15 minutes away from the nearest OB-GYN in the neighboring county.
The argument that travel distance is restrictive to healthcare access also falls flat on its face when you consider that the average travel time for most Americans to get to any medical care is anywhere from 10.5 – 17 minutes, according to research by Pew. Does that mean that there’s a war being waged against people’s general health and well-being? Or is it because it’s ridiculous to expect a hospital, medical clinic, or OB-GYN to be on every street corner in a nation of more 330 million people?
And that’s before we get to the ubiquitous presence of gas stations, grocery stores, and pharmacies that by and large carry condoms and other contraceptives that Mace claims are “unreachable.”
Would more healthcare facilities staffed by OB-GYNs be a good thing? Absolutely — but is South Carolina really a dystopian, patriarchal wasteland where women are unable to access healthcare? Only if a 15-minute car, cab, or bus ride is no different than the authoritarian government laid out in The Handmaids Tale.
As ever, Mace’s chief problem is that a basic review of census data and travel distances on Google maps can tear apart her central thesis. Reality itself is not on her side – and we suspect it won’t be the last time.