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Last year the Texas Legislature passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed a Trigger Ban that would ban abortion in Texas–with no exception for rape, incest, or several fetal abnormality–if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
That day has come, and the Supreme Court has disregarded almost 50 years of precedent and stripped millions of their reproductive freedom. Before last week’s ruling, this bill went through a hearing in the Texas House Committee on Public Health, on which I serve. What I witnessed in that hearing can serve as a lesson for us all, as we grapple with the loss of Roe.
More than twice as many people signed up to testify against the Trigger Ban (111) than for it (47). However, the Republican committee chair limited testimony to an hour total and alternated between people who supported the bill and people who opposed it.
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What happened next shocked me. Someone stood up, told us they opposed the bill and opposed abortion access. They were against the bill because it didn’t go far enough.
There were also passionate individuals from the Trust Respect Access Coalition reading the stories of abortion patients. However, the majority of the testimony turned into a back-and-forth between “mainstream” anti-abortion groups arguing that the Trigger Ban and other incremental bills were the next strategic step and the more extreme groups arguing that anything less than making abortion a crime immediately was “selling out.”
At least one said she wanted women who sought abortions to be prosecuted for murder. By the end of the testimony on the Trigger Ban and a suite of other anti-abortion bills, we’d heard from dozens of these anti-abortion advocates who opposed the bills.
Roe v. Wade and its subsequent interpretations were the law of the land for almost 50 years. During those 50 years, Republicans could rile up their far right base by promising to end abortion.
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Fifty years for the majority of voters who support legal access to get more and more comfortable, assuming that the famous Supreme Court ruling would never be overturned.
It was a good political deal for Republicans.
Texas State Rep. Erin Zwiener (EMILY’s List)
As long as Roe held, they could rattle their sabers and make bigger and bigger “impossible” promises without the consequences (both political and for their constituents) of actually banning abortion.
Meanwhile, Republicans who stood firm and continued to support abortion rights got methodically weeded out of their own party through the primary election process. At least here in Texas, every elected Republican in the legislature is an electoral hostage of the anti-abortion movement.
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Now, with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, Republicans have become the dog that’s caught the car, and those promises are coming due. We’d all be fools to think those promises stop at the Texas Trigger Ban, the Mississippi 15 week ban, or even at abortion access itself.
Pro-choice activists protest against the decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v Wade decision in Athens. ((Photo by George Panagakis/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images))
As I write this, one of my colleagues, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has said he’ll consider prosecuting and suing people and corporations who pay for others to leave Texas to seek an abortion, arguing that a 100-year-old law that was explicitly overturned in Roe v. Wade can be used to do so. One of my colleagues, Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, has said that he’s working with the National Association of Christian Lawmakers on legislation to ban state residents from traveling to other states to seek care.
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So what would be next after abortion? The extreme right is a beast that asks to be fed every single legislative session, and they are masters at upping the ante and challenging my colleagues to go to further and further extremes to enforce their own morality on the rest of us.
My money would be on emergency contraception, which I’ve already heard many of my colleagues refer to as abortion. Or perhaps same-gender marriage.
Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion sideswipes at the Obergefell v. Hodges decision which made marriage equality the law of the land in 2015 as well as Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned our sodomy ban, which criminalized what adults do in their own bedrooms. Paxton has already said he’ll defend that law if the Supreme Court overturns it.
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Or perhaps banning decent sex education. We’re already seeing efforts at the local level to roll-back “Abstinence-plus” sex education (the most comprehensive sex education allowed under current Texas law), which teaches kids about abstinence but also about contraception and STD prevention.
Politics is the process of accumulating power. The extreme right has methodically accumulated power through elections and judicial appointments to get to exactly this moment, where abortion access – something 69% of Americans support – hangs in the balance.
The only way to fight back is to cut off their access to power, to sever their connection to people in leadership. The only way to do that is to make the politicians they support lose elections at every level of government.
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Until the Republican Party faces consistent election losses for the devil’s bargain they made with the extreme right, they won’t have the courage to separate from them.
Help give them that courage.
Source: www.foxnews.com