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More: Texas Consolidates Its Most Horrifying Anti-Choice Bills Into One Nightmare Piece of Legislation
This is the worst “I told you so.” Those four short words bear the weight of lies and broken promises, of empty words from empty people: Republicans who promised they would not go on the offensive against Texans’ reproductive rights this year.
But I did tell you so. When Texas lawmakers—Republicans and Democrats alike—along with members of the media, hailed the 83rd Texas Legislature as a session of compromise and harmony on the issue of abortion, I said reasonable people were being set up by Republicans hell-bent on opening satellite offices in every Texan uterus at the first opportunity.
That opportunity is here. It’s called a “special session.”
Republican Gov. Rick Perry called the 30-day special session this month to address Texas’ redistricting issues, as he and his fellow Republicans fight to prevent the state’s growing minority populations from receiving the democratic representation they’re due; a federal court struck down state and federal district maps drawn in 2011, declaring them discriminatory.
But this week, Perry added a sweeping anti-choice bill to the legislature’s agenda: SB 5, filed by state Sen. Glenn Hegar (R-Katy), combines the worst of anti-choice legislators’ proposed abortion bills from the regular session into a nightmarish document that would decimate Texans’ access to safe, legal abortion care. If passed in its entirety, SB 5 would:
ban all abortions after 20 weeks, with the exception of those “necessary to avert the death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman” or if a fetal anomaly “will result in the death of the infant not later than minutes to hours after birth regardless of the provision of lifesaving medical treatment.”
* require all abortion-providing doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of where the procedure is performed.
* effectively ban telemedical abortions, requiring doctors to provide the abortion pill (a mifepristol/mifepristone combination) in person and according to outdated 13-year-old Food and Drug Administration regulations that are not only unnecessary, but thought to be potentially harmful in current practice, according to the American College of Gynecologists and the Texas Medical Association.
* require all abortion providers to be licensed as ambulatory surgical centers, which would reduce the number of sites at which a Texan can obtain an abortion to a total of five, located solely in major metropolitan areas.
