CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When Taylor Shelton found out she was pregnant in September, she had no idea her case would place her in the middle of a statewide legal battle over the highly contentious topic of abortion rights.
“I found out at four weeks, which is like the earliest possible time, anyone really can find out,” Shelton told WCNC Charlotte's Vanessa Ruffes. “I immediately called one of the three abortion providers in South Carolina, and this was two weeks after the six-week ban went into effect.”
“They couldn't get me in,” Shelton said. “Planned Parenthood couldn't get me in until after that six-week mark.”
Shelton’s unexpected discovery came shortly after South Carolina’s new all-male Supreme Court reversed course on abortion, upholding a ban on most procedures after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which could be around six weeks of pregnancy.
The 4-1 ruling departed from the court’s own decision earlier that year to strike down a similar law.
With this tightening of abortion restrictions, South Carolina joined several other states, particularly in the South, making moves following the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
With abortion providers in her home state unable to help, Shelton became one of an estimated 5,700 South Carolinians, according to the Guttmacher Institute, who sought abortion care in North Carolina. Shelton said she spent a total of roughly 20 hours on the road, crossing state lines multiple times.
“All of it was just really unfair — all the hoops that I had to jump through, and that thousands of other women are also forced to go through,” Shelton said.
Shelton said after a crisis center in Charlotte tried to steer her away from her decision, and her gynecologist in South Carolina would only remove her IUD, she drove north to a Planned Parenthood in Wilmington, North Carolina, that would help.
Shelton is now part of a lawsuit, with co-plaintiff Planned Parenthood South Atlantic (PPSA), against the state of South Carolina, which is “[seeking] clarification to the narrow question of at what point in pregnancy the Act bans abortion.”
The suit states that South Carolina doctors, “faced with the threat of severe criminal and civil penalties” under the state’s Fetal Heartbeat Law, “have had no choice but to stop providing abortion services to patients when any early embryonic electrical activity is visible on ultrasound, after approximately six weeks.”
Shelton and PPSA go on to state in the suit the state law should make clear that “cardiac activity” means “the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart ... when a heart has formed, which is after approximately nine weeks.”
“I hope that people can see that [the law is] seriously ... ruining people's lives, and it's traumatic,” Shelton said.
Recent data gathered by the Guttmacher Institute suggests that, amid tightening abortion laws in South Carolina and other states, the Tar Heel State increasingly grew as a beacon in the South for people determined to have an abortion, with the state seeing one of the largest increases in estimated abortions following the Dobbs decision.
The Guttmacher Institute estimates North Carolina’s rise in the procedure was 44%, ranking in the top four states.
“North Carolina is a critical access state, even with the 12-week ban in effect,” Jillian Riley, North Carolina Director of Public Affairs for PPSA, said. “We are still seeing on average, about 39% of our patients coming from other states.”
Riley said the organization sees patients crossing multiple state lines for services — if they can afford the hardship.
“We see patients from Florida,” Riley said. “We see patients from Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas — any of those states in the South that have bans or near-total bans. We are still one of the closest states for a lot of those folks.”
Riley described the many hurdles that patients have to go through to travel across state lines for the procedure.
“They have to plan their trip. They have to take time off of work, which could be a loss of income,” Riley continued. “They have to most likely find childcare ... they have to find money to travel across state lines, and then they have to get lodging.”
The Guttmacher Institute data shows, contrary to intuition, abortions have increased by 11% on a nationwide scale following the fall of Roe v. Wade. It attributes the trend to clinics and abortion providers responding to the Supreme Court’s decision, scaling up financial and practical support for those seeking an abortion as state-level restrictions tighten.
The data suggests abortions solely using medicine are a big part of that, rising 10 percentage points since 2020.
Dr. Susan Bane, a board-certified obstetrician/gynecologist in North Carolina, said the share of medication abortions happening lately is notable compared to when she first started practicing medicine.
“63% [of patients] are actually using abortion drugs,” Bane said. “They weren't surgical procedures, and that's a big difference from years before.”
Bane, a regional medical director for four pregnancy centers in North Carolina and a member of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians/Gynecologists said not requiring people to see a medical professional first in these cases is a shortcoming in policy.
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"My biggest concern as an OB-GYN physician is how many women I'm seeing who are self-managing their abortions,” Bane said. “So, they are ordering the medications — the drugs —online, without any ongoing medical care, and they're basically not getting informed consent."
"It's these women that really scare me because they're getting lost in the statistics. They're showing up in the emergency department, sadly, with a lot of shame that we, as a society, have got to do better with, and often, aren't even sharing that they took the abortion drugs,” Bane continued, "They're basically saying, 'I just told him I had a miscarriage.' So, they're really not getting the care that they deserve."
Shelton said the policy shortcoming is removing her agency in a decision she says was supposed to be fully hers to make.
“We are watching these rights be stripped,” Shelton said. “It's unbelievably unfair, and I think it's crazy."
Contact Vanessa Ruffes at vruffes@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.