Texas Republicans Endangering Lives

By now you’ve heard and seen plenty of reactions and protests regarding the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and therefore allow states to outlaw abortions. What you may not have noticed is news reports of Texas women who have been denied treatment for miscarriages because our over-zealous and incompetent Republicans in the state legislature made it financially dangerous for a doctor to perform anything that might be construed as an abortion.

Marlena Stell, a Texas woman, carried the fetal remains for two weeks before she could find a doctor to perform what is commonly known as a D and C because doctors feared prosecution under Texas law. The recently passed law allows any idiot to claim the doctor performed an illegal abortion, hoping to collect a $10,000 bounty offered by Texas and the doctor would have to go through an expensive trial then even if they are found not guilty pay their own legal expenses.

Now let’s consider what continuing to carry around a dead fetus can mean. The dead tissue can break up and get into the woman’s blood stream causing infection that can result in death. In other cases it can cause damage to the woman’s reproductive system making them unable to have a future child.

Consider this thought experiment, take some ground meat about half the size of a meatball and wrap in cling wrap then hang it outside on a tree branch during the summer for two or more weeks, then go back and see what you’ve got. Now think about it would be like to have that inside your body as it rots.

Sure, in many cases the woman’s body expels the fetal remains on its own after a while, but all too often it doesn’t. As the husband of a woman who had three miscarriages I also know the emotional toll carrying around that dead fetus causes for the woman. Texas Republicans didn’t care enough when they wrote the bill outlawing abortions to consider the no doubt unintended consequences of their actions. I often hear folks blame it on men in the legislature but the reality is that all 13 Republican women in the legislature voted for the bill.

Part of Guadalupe County is represented by state senator, Dr. Donna Campbell who signed off on the bill without expressing the slightest reservation. She’s an emergency room physician and given her failure to consider the potential life threatening consequences of her vote I’m hopeful no one I care about ever ends up in an emergency room she staffs.

To compound the issue Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit challenging an executive order by President Joe Biden giving hospitals the right to pre-empt state abortion restrictions when there’s an emergency.

All that’s bad enough but unfortunately they aren’t stopping at abortion, Republicans are going after contraception as well. In Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade he said the court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access.

The right to contraception was established in 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case in which the court found that a constitutional right to privacy protected women’s ability to take birth control. That’s the same right to privacy which was the basis for Roe v. Wade in 1973 and dismissed last month.

In order to protect the right to use contraception in the United States the House passed a bill this month and not a single one of the 24 Republicans in Texas’ congressional delegation voted for it. We’ll have to see what happens in the Senate.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 27, 2022