South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace compares her state’s abortion bill to the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina compared some GOP-led states’ crackdowns on abortion access to dystopian novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ on Sunday.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet The Press, the freshman lawmaker also warned fellow Republicans that taking too extreme of a position on abortion could spell trouble in November’s midterm elections.

It comes after Kansans shattered turnout expectations on Tuesday to vote in droves against a ballot measure that would have stripped its state constitution of the right to terminate a pregnancy up to 22 weeks. 

The vote was the first such public referendum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June.

Mace, who was raped as a teenager, defended her opposition to Roe v. Wade and claimed Congress now had a duty to act on abortion – to shield it from extremes on both sides.

‘Put in guardrails that they’re comfortable with and let’s move forward. And we can do this at the federal level and give some guidance to states or states can do it as well,’ she said, adding that most Americans were not on the fringe.

Her concern with the post-Roe crackdowns, Mace suggested, was with regulations outside of those placing limits on gestational timelines.

‘You’ve got states that are going to try to ban women from traveling, that if you’re raped that you’ve got to report it to the police,’ Mace said. 

‘Well, I was raped when I was 16, and it took me a week to tell my mother. By that time any evidence would’ve been gone.’

She took aim at legislation that’s just recently been introduced in South Carolina that would totally ban abortion save for emergencies when the life of the mother is in danger.

‘My own home state, they want women to be required and mandated to report when they are raped. And I just can’t even imagine a world where your girl, a teenage girl who’s been raped, to have to report those things,’ Mace said.

‘And, you know, Handmaid’s Tale was not supposed to be a road map, right? This is a place where we can be in the center. We can protect life and we can protect where people are on both sides of the aisle.’

Mace defended herself as ‘staunchly pro-life’ but warned her colleagues within the GOP – as well as lawmakers across the aisle – against catering to the fringes on abortion rights.

‘I do think that it will be an issue in November if we’re not moderating ourselves, that we are included exceptions for women who’ve been raped, for girls who are victims of incest, and certainly in every instance where the life of the mother is at stake,’  Mace explained.

‘That’s where the vast majority of women are in my state. And I’m going to continue to fight for those things. But we can’t go to the far corners of the right or the far corners of the left.’

She said earlier in the interview, ‘On the far left you have folks that want abortion for any reason up until birth, and then on the far right we have states that are trying to ensure that no abortion for any reason including rape and incest victims in girls.’ 

‘Somewhere in the middle is where we’ve got to meet, and I do believe that Congress has a role, and I want to play a part in that role in shaping policy for the future for every American in our country,’ Mace also said.

The GOP lawmaker recently came out on top of a primary race against a challenger backed by Donald Trump, Katie Arrington. 

She’s also one of eight Republican lawmakers to vote in favor of the House of Representatives’ Right to Contraception Act, which would have codified the rights granted by Roe v. Wade.