 I voted for the pancapable bill, the fetal heartbeat bill, and the fetal heartbeat has been for six weeks now. The second week that the fetal heartbeat bill became law, a doctor called me out of Anderson. I live in Easley. A 19-year-old girl appeared at the ER. She was 15 weeks pregnant, her water broke, and the fetus was unviable. The standard of care was to advise her that they could extract or she could go home. The attorneys told the doctors that because of the fetal heartbeat bill, because that 15-week-old had a heartbeat, the doctors could not extract. So their only choices were to admit the 19-year-old until that fetal heartbeat stopped. I asked how long does it take to stop. She said, seconds, minutes, hours, maybe days, or discharge. They discharged that 19-year-old. The doctor told me at that point, there's a 50% chance, well first, she's going to pass this fetus in the toilet. She's going to have to deal with that on her own. There's a 50% chance, greater than 50% chance that she's going to lose her uterus. There's a 10% chance that she will develop sepsis and herself die. That weighs on me. I voted for that bill. These are affecting people and we're having a meeting about this. It took that whole week I did not sleep. That was Republican State Representative Neil Collins of South Carolina expressing deep regret over a forced brother bill that he supported after seeing its consequences. And I'm glad that he feels guilt. I'm glad that this weighs heavily on his conscience. I'm glad that it keeps him up at night. This should teach him a lesson because as a lawmaker, you can't just vote on legislation that makes you feel good. Believe it or not, policymaking is very complicated. You can't just vote on things based on your ideology. You have to determine whether or not voting for something, a particular policy that you create is going to have the intended output. So if you pass a policy, you don't necessarily know that's going to lead to other unintended consequences. And if so, how can you incorporate that into the current bill that you're voting on to mitigate these unintended consequences? These policymakers, they lead me to believe that they've never taken a policymaking political science course. And I feel like that's really important. People kind of brush aside the social sciences, but political science is very important. And policymaking in and of itself is really complicated. So if you don't know about these things, if you don't know about medical decisions, if you haven't spoken to experts, if you haven't brought in doctors who would have told you what you're seeing now, I mean, I'm glad you feel guilty. I'm glad he changed his heart, but I'm also glad that he feels guilty. He should feel guilty because that's just when you ruin people's lives with your legislation, I want you to feel that. And it's sad that more people don't actually feel the same way or actually admit that they fucked up, quite frankly. Now, this is a huge thing for an individual like Neil Collins, because before every indication that he's given us suggests that he's very, very extremist on this particular issue. In fact, on his Facebook in 2018, he regurgitated the lies about Planned Parenthood based on heavily edited sting videos by the far right propaganda outlet Project Veritas. And in 2019, he vocalized his intent to support a fetal heartbeat bill and voted for two other pieces of anti-abortion legislation, even knowing that what he was supporting was unconstitutional, but he was hoping that supporting these unconstitutional bills would trigger a challenge to row. So that way the Supreme Court would take it up again since the makeup of the court had changed with Trump being president. But now he's in the finding out portion of fucking around. He's realizing that banning abortion doesn't just mean that, oh, women who, you know, use the abortion as a form of birth control willy-nilly aren't going to be able to get abortions. I mean, even if that were the case, that'd still be wrong to ban abortions. But it goes broader than just banning abortions. It actually impacts people who have miscarriages. It affects women who have a fatal fetal defect and not getting rid of the fetus doing a procedure similar to an abortion might actually threaten their lives. Now, just a quick update to this story, courtesy of Mediaite, the woman Collins referred to eventually returned to the hospital two weeks later to have her fetus extracted. After Collins remarks, he refused to vote for a near total abortion ban that does not include exceptions for rape or incest. The only exception would be to save the life of the mother. The reason why so many more pro-lifers are going to come to the same conclusion as Neal Collins did is because they haven't thought this through. They just based their ideology, their pro-life, i.e. forced brother view on this feeling that, oh, my God, this is what is going to protect life. So of course I have to do this when in actuality, they don't realize that their advocacy for banning abortion is going to endanger the lives of women. And as more of these types of stories come out, well, more people are going to realize that they were wrong. And we've talked about these stories on the podcast again and again. But just to give you a quick recap, as Dalia Lithwick of Slate writes, every day between now and November, we are going to hear about atrocities befalling women whose complicated pregnancies, miscarriages and forced birth are not the stuff of Hallmark movies. These tales are becoming part of virtually everyone's collective muscle memory. This week alone, we have endured the story of a Louisiana woman, Nancy Davis, who will be forced to carry a skullless fetus for the next six months. And a 16 year old in Florida deemed too immature to abort, but seemingly just fine to be apparent. Republicans devoted last month to calling a child rape victim who was denied abortion care in Ohio and flown to Indiana for treatment a liar. We're hearing horror stories about women denied access to metharotrexate, which is used to treat certain types of cancer because it can be used for abortion. We're hearing about pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for plan B and oral contraceptives. We're hearing about the Texas woman who carried a dead fetus for two weeks and the women who cannot be treated for egg topic pregnancies and miscarriages until their own lives are at risk are now the stuff of daily reporting, as are the certifiably insane responses from Republican candidates, including Michigan's GOP candidate this week, who argued that 14 year old rape victims should be forced to carry to term because the forced birth will provide a bond that is healing. And so as these stories continue to spread and go viral, there is going to be a plethora of forced birthers who realized that they were wrong. But the problem is that there are some forced birthers who will never change their mind. They're that unreasonable. They've made it very clear that they believe that the fetus is more important than the woman's life. So I like to see stories of lawmakers like this, lawmakers like Neil Collins admitting that he was wrong. But the problem is that not everyone is going to admit they were wrong, even if they know they were wrong. In fact, I'd argue that a lot of lawmakers don't even believe what they say when it comes to abortion. They know that abortion is not murder, as they argue, but they say this because if they betray evangelicals, a very vocal and sizable portion of the GOP base, which is a reliable voter, a reliable constituent, then their political career may be over. So they basically have to pretend as if this is a reasonable position when they know it's not reasonable, it's irresponsible and it's going to endanger the lives of countless women as we've already seen. But whenever we see, you know, a moment where a politician is honest, I want to celebrate that. I'm not going to give him credit because he should have listened to doctors and women before voting on that legislation and voting on the other anti-abortion bills that he supported, but still give him credit in the sense that he was willing to own up to his mistakes. But now what matters is him writing this wrong, fixing the mistake that he made being an advocate for the pro choice movement, who logically claims that this is a decision that is very personal and it should be left up to the woman and her doctor.