Abbott should help restore women’s rights
Women in Texas don’t need Abbott to continue feigning compassion.
The ripple effects from the Supreme Court’s seismic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade have forced anti-abortion candidates to reckon with energized voters who woke up one day with fewer constitutional rights.
Abortion activists have already played a key role in primary races, including in unlikely places such as Kansas and Alaska. The success of pro-choice candidates has forced some Republicans to contort their previous statements on abortion to seem less extreme. Most notably, several now claim to support exceptions to abortion restrictions such as in instances of rape or incest or situations that put the mother’s life in danger.
And yet Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed the most restrictive abortion law in the nation months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, appears determined to toe the hard line.
Abbott has doubled down — supporting an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest — a calculated gamble showing he’s willing to prioritize the extreme demands of his base over the views of the majority of his constituents, who strongly support at least some abortion rights. While he’s backed off of his farfetched vow to “eliminate rape” in the state of Texas — a hasty response to a reporter’s question about how the abortion ban would affect sexual assault victims — his latest attempt to address the issue is almost as cringeworthy.
“We want to support those victims, but also those victims can access health care immediately, as well as to report it,” Abbott said during a segment on Lone Star Politics. “By accessing health care immediately, they can get the Plan B pill that can prevent a pregnancy from occurring in the first place.”
We’ll give Abbott credit for coming back to reality. Perhaps it dawned on him that ending rape just wasn’t feasible, what with Texas leading the nation in rape offenses in 2020 and the clearance rate for rape arrests dropping by nearly half over the course of his tenure. Or maybe he considered the state’s enormous backlog of untested rape kits, which have left thousands of victims in limbo as they await justice.
Yet telling rape victims to go out and get a pill that’s only effective within 72 hours of conception reflects Abbott’s fundamental misunderstanding of the effects of trauma.
Plan B, also known as the “morning-after pill,” is a critical tool to prevent pregnancy. Yet many women who suffer the trauma of sexual assault don’t immediately realize they can be pregnant. As Piper Stege Nelson, chief public strategies officer for the SAFE Alliance, told NPR last year, many rape victims sometimes cope with the abuse by numbing themselves to the reality that they could be pregnant.
“That dissociation can lead to a detachment from reality and the fact that she’s pregnant,” Nelson said.
Even for victims who want to follow the governor’s advice and immediately pursue Plan B, the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe has made obtaining the pill far more difficult. Pills have been in such high demand in Texas that some pharmacies have been forced to limit sales because of dwindling supply. It’s one reason why the owner of a suburban Lubbock coffee shop started giving away the pill for free.And, in another testament to the extremism and ignorance that exists in the anti-abortion movement in this state, protesters were quick to condemn her as well, apparently believing Plan B to cause abortion.
Perhaps the governor’s promotion of it will clear up that misconception. But other obstacles remain: When Plan B is available over the counter, it’s not exactly cheap. It can cost up to $50 at a pharmacy unless you have an insurance plan that covers it. And for a state with the highest uninsured population in the nation, that means many low-income women are forced to pay what could be a prohibitive price for a pill that could restore some modicum of control over their reproductive lives.
If Abbott’s desire were genuine to help rape victims — or any woman, for that matter — avoid unwanted pregnancy, he’d make a serious effort to expand health access for Texas women. That starts with a step he has refused to take for years: expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a program that requires insurance companies to cover women’s contraceptives. Texas is one of only a dozen states that has steadfastly refused to expand the program. The state’s recent plan to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage is so restrictive — it excludes women who terminate pregnancies, even in medical emergencies — that the federal government is likely to reject it.
If Abbott wanted to encourage more pharmacies and other stores to sell Plan B over the counter, he could direct the attorney general to clarify the legality of doing so since there seems to be so much confusion. Emergency contraception does not require a doctor’s prescription or parental consent to people over 17 years old, and yet that coffee shop outside Lubbock, Tumbleweed + Sage in Wolfforth, has had the police called on them for making the pill available.
Another thing the governor could do to truly aid rape victims and catch predators before they rape again is help local law enforcement investigate the crimes. The Lavinia Masters Act Abbott signed into law in 2019 provided $50 million in grant funding for local authorities, and requires labs to process a kit within 90 days of receipt. Yet the Dallas Observer reported that data from late 2021 shows that over 1,000 kits which had been sent to labs between September 2019 and late November 2021 were not analyzed within the required time frame. Strengthening the law by threatening to pull grant funding from governments that lag in testing could go a long way.
Women in Texas don’t need Abbott to continue feigning compassion. They need him to restore their rights to control their own bodies. Short of that, they need him to take realistic steps to reduce rapes and improve access to emergency contraception. It’s not nearly enough — but it’s better than some impossible promise he couldn’t keep if he wanted to.