Has the State of Texas Devised a Foolproof Way

to Overturn Roe v. Wade?

 

Tonight the Texas legislature’s latest anti-abortion statute is about to go into effect.

 

It will award to any person a bounty of $10,000 plus attorney’s fees who reports to Texas legal authorities the performance of an abortion on any woman who is six weeks or more pregnant.

 

The reporter need not be associated with the woman who has such an abortion.

 

The mother of the fetus need not actually be aware that she is at least six weeks pregnant or that she was pregnant at all.

 

The reporter need not show any relationship to the proposed mother of the unborn child, i.e., need not be the father of the aborted child, the husband of the woman having the abortion, the physician who performs the abortion (heretofore legally), any person affiliated with the medical office of said physician or other abortion provider, or any person connected with law enforcement such as it may be. That reporter need not even be a resident of Texas.

 

In other words, anti-abortion zealots who have no connection of any kind to a woman who is desperate to have an early abortion—whether or not she is even certain she is pregnant, since many women do not know they have conceived for a time period well past six weeks following impregnation—now have an incentive to hunt down and report any female person in the State of Texas who has had or wishes to have what has been a legal abortion pursuant to Roe v. Wade until this very hour.

 

Some fanatical person, not necessarily a resident of Texas, who carries signs, harasses pregnant women seeking pregnancy advice, and publicizes the names and other personal data about abortion providers—often to hunt them down and humiliate them, and sometimes to murder them—will have the blessing of the state of Texas to go after them with their legal guns drawn.

 

And the women of Texas will be caught in this trap by professional abortion mercenaries whose motive is to impose their notion of who may or may not legally abort a fetus by seeking payment from the public till—aided by similarly minded legal counsel—according to their twisted notions of the legality or illegality of abortion in the state of Texas.

 

For this we have the legislators of the Lone Star State and its Governor Greg Abbott to thank, men (almost exclusively) imbued with the zeal of the fanatical, many awash in evangelical religious justification, and all of them intent on controlling the reproductive lives of Texas women.

 

Counsel who oppose such an obviously unconstitutional  statute are attempting to persuade the federal courts to issue a late-night injunction against the effective date, methods, and philosophy of such a statute, but such efforts will be occurring down to the wire and will no doubt be followed by subsequent efforts to oppose them.

 

So what does this all mean? What does it signify long after the 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion during such time as a fetus is too small and undeveloped to be viable, to live outside the womb should it be born early? With certain exceptions even to that standard such as a pregnancy caused by rape and/or danger to the life of the mother or the child?

 

WOMEN OF AMERICA, STAND UP AND BE COUNTED AMONG THOSE WHO HAVE UNDERGONE ILLEGAL ABORTIONS AND TELL THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WHAT LIES AHEAD IN THE EVENT SUCH A STATUTE IS UPHELD BY THE COURTS AS APPROPRIATE AND, IN THIS DAY AND AGE, “LEGAL” by the Bush/Trump conservative Supreme Court.

 

Even with the advent of medical abortions, which may not run afoul of an outrageous statute such as that proposed by Texas—and without traditional legal standing by a party seeking a financial bounty for preventing innocent women from exercising their right to control their decision whether or not to bear a child—it is no secret that the average pregnancy is not diagnosed until well after the sixth week of pregnancy. A variety of reasons underlie this state of events, including regularity of menstruation, type of pregnancy symptoms, sophistication of the mother in understanding the significance of symptoms of very early pregnancy, access to a qualified medical opinion, availability of pregnancy testing, and the like.

 

What is really behind such an outrageous purported statute is the long sought-after control of the Christian evangelical movement in America of the bodies of American women, their ability to interpret Scripture in such a manner as to dominate and determine which children may be born and which may not.

 

It is a statute that American women must oppose with all their zeal, protests, public marches, financial assistance, lobbying, and outrage. It is a statute drafted by the ignoramuses of this world—mostly male but not entirely—who have inserted themselves into the most intimate of decisions ever made in the lives of women . . . whether to beget or bear a child.