South Carolina’s new all-male Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed course on abortion, upholding a ban on most such procedures after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The 4-1 ruling deviates from the court’s own decision earlier this year to strike down a similar law.

The continued erosion of access to legal abortion in the southern US comes after Republican lawmakers replaced the only woman on the court, Judge Kaye Hearn.

Writing for the new majority, Judge John Kittredge acknowledged that the 2023 law infringes on women’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy, but said the state

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The legislature has reasonably determined this time that those interests do not outweigh the interest of the unborn child to live.

As a Court, unless we can say that the balance reached by the legislature was legally unreasonable, we must enforce the law, Kittredge wrote.

It was Hearn who wrote the key majority opinion in January, scrapping the ban. The court then ruled that the law violated the state constitution’s right to privacy.

Hearn subsequently reached the court’s mandatory retirement age, allowing the Republicans to dominate

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The legislature has appointed Gary Hill to what is now the country’s only state Supreme Court with an all-male seat.

With a newly installed Supreme Court, Republican lawmakers passed a new abortion law in 2023 that they believed would pass a second time. Specifically, the law was drafted to address Judge John Few’s concern, expressed in January’s ruling, that lawmakers failed to consider whether the abortion restrictions were reasonable enough to infringe on privacy rights in favor of the right to life.

Abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, are heading south again.

Hill joined the majority on Wednesday, along with Few, who had previously voted to overturn the 2021 bill.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court last year’s Roe v. Wade, overturned the 1973 ruling that provided access to abortion nationwide, most Republican Party-controlled states have enacted or passed some type of abortion ban. They have all been challenged in court.