Policy sham

Lawmakers must move past abortion debate.

Wendy Davis may have lost the filibuster battle, but she won the legal war.

The Supreme Court held in a 5-3 decision Monday that key provisions in Texas’ House Bill 2 were unconstitutional restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion. That 2013 bill was the subject of Davis’ famous 13-hour filibuster and thrust the North Texas state senator into the national limelight — and an ill-fated campaign for governor.

Davis has left the political arena, but she can rest in private life knowing that she was ultimately vindicated in her opposition to the bill’s mandates that doctors providing abortions have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and that abortion facilities meet surgical center requirements.

The bill’s supporters claimed that those two restrictions were necessary to protect women’s health. Unlike in the Texas Legislature, however, the Supreme Court requires advocates to prove that point. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court, Texas couldn’t identify a “single instance” when the admitting privileges requirement “would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment.”

Or as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her concurring opinion, “It is beyond rational belief that H.B. 2 could genuinely protect the health of women.”

This finding is no grand secret to Texas politicos. Former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst made the unconstitutional agenda clear when he tweeted in 2013 that the bill would “essentially ban abortion statewide.”

Now his successor, Dan Patrick, has threatened to cram the issue down Texans’ throat yet again. As we confront the potential of another legislative session that ignores real challenges that make life unnecessarily difficult for Texas businesses and families, it is time to admit that our state’s political anti-abortion movement has never actually cared about the well-being of our babies.

There is no greater proof of this fact than the lack of political capital being spent on fixing Child Protective Services, an institution so broken that it actually hurts kids more than it helps. Last year alone there were 66,000 cases of child abuse and neglect in Texas, including 171 deaths. But CPS remains unequipped to help the most vulnerable among us. Meanwhile, many of the 28,000 kids in CPS care have been kept in hospitals and state offices because there are no available foster homes.

The problems of CPS underfunding and an overworked staff are welldocumented going back 20 years. Last December, a federal court found Texas’ foster-care system to be unconstitutionally unsafe.

But instead of picking up this charge, Patrick and his political allies continue to promote an agenda where kids, mothers and families merely seem to exist within the confines of abortion debates. Only voters, not the courts, can put an end to this political malpractice.