SC’s top prosecutor joins group to support abortion ban case in front of Supreme Court

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson joined 23 other state attorneys general Friday in seeking to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn the 1973 decision that legalized abortions

The Roe v. Wade decision “has no basis in the Constitution and has led to nothing but confusion in the courts,” Wilson’s statement said.

His desire to overturn Roe v. Wade was expressed to the nation’s highest court in a letter supporting Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. A case centered on the Mississippi abortion law will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court this court session.

“The Framers of the Constitution did not in their wildest dreams imagine a constitutional right to abortion, which was illegal everywhere when the Constitution was written,” Wilson said in his statement. “There are rulings the Supreme Court made that were overturned decades later because of new information or the realization that the previous rulings were wrong.”

Abortion violates the constitutional rights to “life and equal protection,” he said.

Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in the United States.

In the case that made abortions legal, a majority of the justices found that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives a person a “right to privacy,” and that protects a woman’s choice to have an abortion. Pro-choice advocates argue that laws restricting abortions are not only illegal by court precedent but morally corrupt because such laws take away women’s rights to their own bodies.

Earlier this year, as the South Carolina Senate debated its own law to restrict abortions — commonly called the fetal heartbeat bill — state Sen. Mia McLeod, D-Richland, said that if women don’t have the option to get a legal abortion, they’ll find other, sometimes dangerous ways to get one. She was joined in her opposition to the bill by her Republican colleague Sandy Senn of Charleston, who said women “don’t need guidance on issues concerning our wombs.” The fetal heartbeat bill passed and became law in February.

The letter signed on by Wilson was also signed by the following states’ attorneys:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.