Abortion bill OK’D in Texas House
The Texas House voted Wednesday to ban abortions as early as six weeks into a woman’s pregnancy and allow anyone to sue her doctor, relatives or any other person who helped her obtain the procedure if it is done after a fetal heartbeat had been detected.
The Republican-led measure would amount to the most stifling reproductive restrictions in Texas since abortion was legally protected in the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade. The vote was 81-63, falling largely along party lines.
“For far too long, abortion has meant the end of a beating heart,” said Rep. Shelby Slawson, R-stephenville. “But through this … that beautiful melody of a beating heart, will mean the protection of those innocent unborn lives in Texas.”
The measure, known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, could result in a virtual prohibition on all abortions, since most women don’t yet know they’re pregnant by the gestational point at which it would be outlawed in the state.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has already named the legislation as a priority this session, and the Senate passed a similar version last month. After a mostly procedural followup vote on Thursday, it will head back to the upper chamber for review before being sent to the governor.
Unlike similar laws in other
states, the Texas bill leaves enforcement up to the public rather than state health officials. That provision is an attempt to block providers from suing the state to delay its implementation — a move that legal scholars have been skeptical of and that advocates have decried as unconstitutional. Legal challenges are expected.
About a dozen states have passed similar bills, most of them are still tied up in litigation.
Flanked by fellow Republican women in the House, Slawson urged her colleagues to pass the new restriction by telling the story of how her own mother’s doctor had recommended an abortion due to medical complications, but still carried her to term.
“Forty-four years and two days later, that little baby girl is standing in this chamber, her heart beating as strongly and as rapidly as it did all those years ago,” she said.
Rep. Gina Hinojosa, Daustin, responded with her own story of dealing with a medically unviable pregnancy, and of the difficult decision she made to carry the child to term, only for it to die soon after birth. She pleaded with members not to take that same choice away from other women.
“If we want to stop abortion, we do it in our churches, we do it in our communities, we do it in conversation with women, in relationship with women, we support families,” she said. “We don’t do it by government mandate.”
Under the proposed law, anyone in Texas could sue a doctor or anyone else who “aids or abets” an abortion, such as the person who drove the woman to get the abortion, for example, or a parent who paid for it, for up to seven years after the alleged violation. An amendment by Slawson that was adopted Wednesday created an exception that would prohibit a person who impregnated someone else by rape, assault or incest from bringing a civil suit. However, the bill does not make exceptions allowing women in those situations to receive abortions.
Texas state law already bans most abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for women with life-threatening medical conditions and fetuses with severe abnormalities. Of the 56,620 abortions reported in 2019, according to state data, 90.8 percent were performed at 10 or fewer weeks, and 83.7 percent were performed at eight or fewer weeks.
Rep. Donna Howard, Daustin, pressed Slawson on the scientific basis of her bill, citing the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other doctors who have said that what is heard during an early ultrasound are electrical signals, as the heart does not develop until much later. Slawson disagreed.
“You’re telling me the science is wrong because you disagree with it?” Howard asked, adding later as tensions rose: “This is the worst day of the session every single session, and the stuff keeps coming up. You guys know there have always been abortions and always will be, despite the obstructions you’re putting in place.”
On Tuesday, hundreds of doctors across the state sent a letter to state lawmakers urging them not to pass the bill, saying it would bring chaos to the court system and prevent women from receiving even sound medical advice.
“Regardless of our personal beliefs about abortion, as licensed physicians in Texas, we implore you to not weaponize the judicial branch against us to make a political point,” they wrote. A group of lawyers sent a similar plea last month.