Abbott’s cynical ploy
Governor and attorney general are exploiting worries over coronavirus to delay abortions.
When Democrats balked this week at the Senate stimulus bill, arguing it attached too few strings to the hundreds of billions in bailouts for corporations and skimped on help for displaced workers, Republicans were quick to denounce the delay as a sordid example of partisan gamesmanship in the face of urgent national need.
“They want effectively to mandate quotas on boards of directors,” Sen. Ted Cruz said in an angry speech on the Senate floor Monday. “What in the hell does that have to do with this crisis?”
Arguably, corporate board reform — of which diversity goals are one part — has a lot to do with ensuring billions of dollars in this corporate bailout is better spent than money in the bank bailout of 2008. But let’s concede that some Democrat demands — restructuring the postal service debt, for instance — were extraneous and ill-timed. The Republican naivety in pushing a $500 billion bailout without any oversight was also an idea in need of refinement.
Fortunately, the legislative process worked. While Cruz and others were shouting, Democrats kept talking to the White House, and they struck a deal to among other things add an inspector general to monitor how funds are passed out.
But where was the same outrage from Cruz and others when Republicans slammed the House version of the stimulus because it didn’t include an explicit prohibition on reimbursement for abortions — despite federal law already forbidding that? To paraphrase our senator, what in the heck does that have to do with the coronavirus?
Not a thing. But that same opportunism soon spread far beyond Congress. Governors in Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi and, yes, Texas craftily exploited legitimate orders to delay nonessential medical procedures by slipping in temporary bans on abortion. Some anti-abortion groups applaud Texas for being the only state to actually enforce the ban.
Gov. Greg Abbott issued a March 22 order shutting down until April 21 any surgeries or medical procedures not necessary to prevent death or long-term medical consequences to the patient. He exempted procedures that don’t take up precious hospital beds or require protective medical gear in short supply.
Abortion should qualify for an exemption. It is an “essential component of comprehensive health care,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and seven other medical groups wrote in a joint letter last week opposing the delays.
Denying an abortion — even for a month — could have serious, long-term consequences. They’re normally performed at clinics, not hospitals. A delay only means risking a later-term abortion — a result that helps no one, including, one would think, “prolifers” who say they abhor later-term abortions.
When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Wednesday that abortions “can be done later,” he is in effect arguing for a scenario that Texas has spent several legislative sessions trying to prevent: later abortions.
Paxton quickly reminded doctors they’d be fined or jailed if they performed abortions under these circumstances.
Of course, mere delay isn’t really what Abbott and company are aiming for with this maneuver. It’s a shiny new loophole with a permanent goal: to delay long enough to block a woman from accessing her constitutional right to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Those who oppose abortion have every right to wish they lived in a land where it wasn’t legal. But that’s not America. The Supreme Court declared nearly 50 years ago that women have a fundamental — though like gun rights, not unlimited — right to an abortion. That was upheld by a conservative-led court in 1992 and again in 2016 when the court ruled 5-3 to strike down Texas’ efforts to make getting an abortions more difficult.
There are valid health considerations for all medical procedures in the face of the novel coronavirus. But pretending a long delay in making abortion services available to women is without serious consequence is farce. Abortion is not a tummy tuck.
Nor is it necessarily even a surgery. Often, it’s a set of pills.
Nearly 90 percent of U.S. abortions occur in the first trimester. In 2017, medication abortions accounted for 39 percent of all abortions, according to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute. But Texas providers say they’ve stopped those too, because it’s unclear if they’re permitted under Abbott’s order. Abortion providers sued Texas in federal court this week to block the order.
Cruz did the right thing in voting for the coronavirus bill, and he’s to be credited for repeatedly insisting that COVID-19 is a genuine public health crisis. But he and others would find their pious proclamations about keeping politics out of public policy more persuasive if the outrage weren’t so selective.
Any abortion that a doctor decides can be performed safely should be allowed to go forward. That’s not politics. It’s the law.