State bill ups the ante on abortion
Abortions would be nearly impossible to get under legislation rocketing through the Texas Legislature that abortionrights advocates call “uniquely worse” than anything they’ve seen elsewhere in the nation.
While the courts have blocked nearly a dozen other states from enacting similar so-called fetal heartbeat bills that essentially ban abortions after as little as six weeks of pregnancy, Texas lawmakers are convinced they’ve engineered a bill that can withstand legal challenges.
Instead of the state enforcing the law, State Sen.
Bryan Hughes, R-mineola, said his bill will allow any Texan to file a civil suit against a doctor or any person who “aids and abets” a woman who gets an abortion after a heartbeat has been detected in the fetus. He said that means no state actor would be enforcing the abortion ban, a key sticking point in past abortion restrictions that federal courts have repeatedly found to be unconstitutional.
Instead, the Hughes bill leaves enforcement up to the public.
“This bill says for the little baby inside her mother’s womb, if there is a heartbeat detected, that little baby will be
protected,” Hughes said on Monday as the Texas Senate began debating the legislation.
The Texas Senate voted 19-12 to pass the bill on Tuesday. It now goes to the Texas House, where they have a similar version under consideration authored by State Rep. Shelby Slawson, a Stephenville Republican. Her bill has been assigned to the House Public Health Committee, which has yet to hold a hearing on it.
If both chambers pass an identical bill, it would then go to Gov. Greg Abbott for his approval. Abbott, a Republican, has made more abortion restrictions one of his priority items for the Legislature.
Caroline Duble, the political director for the state abortion advocacy group Avow, said she’s seen a lot of outrageous attempts to ban abortions but has never seen anything quite as bad as what Hughes is pushing.
“This is uniquely worse than any of the other bills we’ve seen in other states,” she said.
Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute reviews thousands of bills in state legislatures dealing with abortion. She says she’s never seen a bill like the one in Texas.
Nash says the Hughes bill comes as states such as Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma try to outdo each other on abortion bans in hopes their bills will get to the Supreme Court — which Donald Trump shifted to the right with three presidential appointments — in a quest to overturn the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade.
“They’re not just throwing the kitchen sink, they’re now throwing the dishwasher, the refrigerator and the microwave too,” Nash said. “It really is intense.”
While other states have included provisions for civil lawsuits, she said she hasn’t seen any state take that approach to same the level as Senate Bill 8.
The legislation makes no exceptions for women who are raped or are victims of incest. What’s more, it allows anyone in Texas to sue a doctor, even if they don’t know anyone involved in the case. It also bars doctors targeted by suits from collecting attorneys fees. And it allows lawsuits against others who might be involved, such as the person who drove the woman to get the abortion for example, or a parent who paid for it.
“I think it makes a mockery of the rights of individuals to carry out their professional practice by deputizing the whole state to sue them for a private personal constitutional decision,” State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-dallas, said Monday. “I think it’s a really sad encroachment on our constitutional rights.”
As creative as abortion opponents think they are being, attorneys at ACLU of Texas — which has led legal challenges to past Texas abortion restrictions — say they’re not worried.
“The Texas Legislature is not above the law,” said Drucilla Tigner, the group’s political strategist on reproductive rights.
She said the bill would not only infringe on the constitutional right women have to abortion, but would also violate key parts of the Texas Constitution that open the civil courts to people who have been injured by an action. Senate Bill 8 would allow a person with no direct harm in a case to sue doctors and other individuals, she said.
It is not just Republicans pushing for Senate Bill 8 and a host of other abortion restrictions this year. State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-brownsville, called Hughes’ bill a “long time coming.” He defended Hughes on Monday, saying: “I think, if anything, to stand for abortion really makes a mockery of the sanctity of life.”
The heart beat bill was part of a package of abortion legislation that passed the Senate on Tuesday. Those bills include Senate Bill 9, which reaffirms that abortion is illegal in Texas, in case the high court ever reverses Roe v. Wade. Another bill, SB 394 would bar women from taking a pill to induce an abortion after seven weeks of pregnancy.
Like Senate Bill 8, those bills all now head to the Texas House for consideration.