SC House advances bill giving parents more control over children’s health care and education
COLUMBIA — In a nearly unanimous vote, the House passed a bill Wednesday touted as giving parents more control over their children’s education and medical care, though some Democrats who voted for it said they still had concerns.
The so-called Parental Rights Act passed in a vote of 116 to 1. Rep. Rob Harris, a Spartanburg County Republican, was the only “no” vote.
Supporters praised the bill as giving parents explicit authority over what sort of medical care their children get and what they learn in school.
Along with listing decisions parents can make over their children’s upbringing, the bill raised the age at which children can make their own medical decisions from 16 to 18, except in emergencies, and told school districts to adopt policies giving parents more control over what their children do during the day.
Parents must be able to view lesson plans and evaluations from guidance counselors, and they need to sign off on any lessons involving “gender roles or stereotypes, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” They would also need the ability to pull their children from any extracurricular activities they disagreed with under the bill.
A 16- or 17-year-old could make their own decisions if they got married or otherwise received a court order emancipating them from their parents’ control. Otherwise, the bill clarifies that a parent is in charge of all decisions for their child.
“This bill draws a clear line,” said Rep. Sylleste Davis, a Moncks Corner Republican who leads the committee that advanced it. “Parents, not government agencies, have the primary authority to direct their children’s upbringing, education and health care.”
Democrats who otherwise would have opposed the bill were happy with the changes made, which primarily clarified that parents suspected of abusing their child would not have the same sort of oversight, preventing situations in which a parent refuses to sign off on medical treatment for problems their abuse caused.
House Democrats felt they did everything they could to make the bill palatable, said House Assistant Minority Leader Roger Kirby.
“I feel like we were able to do what we could do with the amount of time and resources that we had here today to work on,” the Lake City Democrat told reporters. “I feel good about what we did today.”
One change that came from a Democrat gave parents the option to give blanket consent for a doctor to make medical decisions for their child, preventing calls every time their teenager needs medication.
“I don’t personally want a doctor calling me before they intervene in my child’s life, in my child’s health care, because I am not a health care professional,” said Rep. Courtney Waters, who proposed the amendment.
Waters, a Charleston Democrat, still didn’t like the bill itself, she said. She voted in favor only because Republicans were willing to work with her to address some of what she saw as the bill’s most glaring issues.
“I don’t like the spirit of it, and I find it unnecessary,” Waters said. “I do not believe that the state has any reason to intervene in the relationship between parents and children.”
Other changes made it more difficult to sue individual teachers, instead requiring lawsuits to go through the school district as long as the teacher was acting in their professional capacity. To challenge a teacher, a parent would need to prove the educator acted maliciously.
Rep. Shannon Erickson praised the bill for creating uniformity from district to district. She proposed the amendment to assuage teachers’ fears that any deviation from their posted lesson plan available to teachers could lead a parent to sue them, she said.
“If you have a subject that pops up in your classroom and you have a moment to teach and it’s not on your lesson plan, we don’t want to hurt that teaching moment, right?” said the Beaufort Republican, who oversees the House education committee.
If the Senate takes up the bill, Democrats in the House still hope to see some changes to ensure teachers don’t face additional burdens and children have more privacy in their medical decisions, Kirby and Waters said.
Whether the bill comes up in the Senate before the end of the year remains an open question.
The bill sets up potential contradictions in state law over what sorts of decisions a teen can make, which could raise eyebrows in the Senate, which prides itself as the state’s deliberative body.
For instance, the bill doesn’t address the compulsory attendance law that allows students to drop out of school without parental consent at 17. Nor does it touch the state’s abortion statute, which allows 17-year-olds to get an abortion before the sixth week of pregnancy without their guardian’s permission.
Those issues did not come up on the floor Wednesday.
Senate bill
A Senate panel discussed a separate bill Wednesday that would guarantee parents a different right.
The subcommittee took no vote on the bill that says any parent or guardian who “guides, instructs, or raises a child” by their biological sex at birth could not face charges of child abuse or have that used against them in a custody dispute.
The bill would also protect parents and foster parents who place a child in counseling that encourages the child not to identify as transgender or who decline any sort of care that would affirm a child’s transgender identity. And it would prohibit the state’s adoption and foster care agency from declining to place a child with a parent who encourages that child to identify as their sex at birth.
Sen. Richard Cash, an Anderson County Republican who sponsored the bill, did not know of any instances of such things happening in South Carolina.
He instead cited one case in Indiana several years ago as what prompted the legislation.
In 2021, a then-16-year-old transgender girl was removed from her parents after the Indiana Department of Child Services received reports of verbal and emotional abuse. The parents said the removal was because they didn’t accept their teen’s gender identity. Indiana courts rejected the parents’ appeals, and in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
“At its core, this bill protects the fundamental role of parents as guardians,” said Myles Thompson, director of the South Carolina Catholic Conference.