South Carolina women: Lovers and Fighters

I wonder if you can tell where women stand in South Carolina simply by doing a keyword search. Butt in chair. Coffee mug in hand.

After all, if a group of people has an array of words for money, that’s supposed to tell us something, right? Ditto for having lots of words for snow?

What if we flipped the premise. What if we looked at the bills that South Carolina lawmakers have introduced so far with the words "women" or "woman."

I did a keyword search on the S.C. General Assembly site.  It didn't yield much.

But to the extent that it did turn up something - about a dozen bills - there was a commemorative license plate for Mary McLeod Bethune, a plan for shuffling various bureaucratic offices, including the S.C. Commission on Women, and a call for including "women and minority members" on a new advisory board for interscholastic athletics.

Another bill proposes a “Purple Heart Day” honoring both "the men and women" who received it.

And two more bills are aimed at preventing women from having abortions. Methods include telling the woman seeking an abortion the gestational age of her fetus and informing her “that anesthetic or analgesic is available to eliminate or alleviate pain to the fetus cause by the particular method of abortion performed or induced.”

Another bill with “woman” in its text says that a woman who has had a caesarean section or suffered an injury from domestic violence should not count those as pre-existing conditions when seeking insurance.

Then there’s the bill that creates a pilot program to give certain Medicaid recipients around-the-clock in-home care. The program is supposed to save money that otherwise gushes out when a Medicaid recipients goes to the emergency room for a bad case of indigestion. "Pregnant women in their third trimester," seniors 65+ and parents with infants would be given priority.

OK - so it all adds up to what, exactly? We see women chiefly as mothers and mothers-to-be? But we will salute them if they receive a Purple Heart in battle?