The real-life horrors of becoming pregnant in Texas, thanks to punitive anti-abortion laws enacted by the state’s Republican legislature and rubber-stamped by its conservative Supreme Court, are now as recurrent as they are inescapable.
Texas has rapidly transformed itself into a cautionary tale showing just how malignant a government controlled by heedless right-wing zealots can be toward its citizens.
For example:
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Last week, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected the appeals of 20 women and two doctors who sued the state because hospitals had refused to provide abortions, even though several of the women had life-threatening conditions. The court ruled that their experiences did not justify invalidating the state’s near-total abortion ban.
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Last month, two professors at the University of Texas at Austin sued the U.S. Department of Education to allow them to punish and fail students who might miss their classes due to time spent getting abortions in other states, or having abortions by medication.
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At its convention last month, the Texas Republican Party called for legislation that transforms the concept of “fetal personhood” into law, an initiative which would effectively make any person who obtains an abortion guilty of homicide.
Texas residents are the ones bearing the immediate brunt of this dystopian reality, but it has implications for everyone else in this country as well.
According to the Mayo Clinic, approximately one in five pregnancies in the U.S. ends in a miscarriage, which is an experience that is distressing enough. But Texas hospitals, staffed with doctors intimidated by punitive abortion restrictions, demonstrate how much worse it could be.
As CBS News reports, Ryan Hamilton and his wife, who asked that her name not be revealed, were expecting their second child this past May when she experienced a miscarriage at 13 weeks. The couple immediately went to the Surepoint Emergency Center, where it was immediately confirmed that the fetus had no heartbeat.
The doctors prescribed a regimen of misoprostol, a drug commonly used for inducing labor, often employed in cases of miscarriage to allow the remains of the fetus to be expelled. It is also prescribed along with mifepristone to induce abortion. Hamilton’s wife was sent home with a prescription for two rounds of the drug. After the second round failed to yield the desired result, they returned to the hospital to request another dose, but the doctors refused to prescribe it.
As Hamilton tweeted a few days later:
Under Texas’ abortion law a doctor who assists a patient in obtaining an “illegal” abortion faces criminal of up to 99 years in jail, a $100,000 fine and loss of their medical license.
CBS reported on this experience in two segments:
The next evening, Hamilton found his wife bleeding and unconscious on the bathroom floor. He carried her to their car and drove to the ER.
“I got to the hospital, ran inside, told them what was happening. And they took her in. And you know what they said? ‘Thank God, you brought her,'” he recalled.
Hamilton’s wife was eventually stabilized, and the couple returned home. But she continued bleeding for weeks.
What’s occurring in Texas illustrates how quickly religious fanaticism can corrupt supposedly nonpolitical institutions, which has implications that go well beyond the state’s borders. The intimidation of the medical community is one example. The lawsuit brought by two University of Texas professors is another.
It is not the job of college professors to be arbiters of students’ behavior or unilaterally punish them if they have differing views. But these two professors seem to have forgotten their place, as demonstrated by the declarations they’ve included in the lawsuit:
“I will certainly accommodate students who are seeking medically necessary abortions in response to a pregnancy that threatens the student’s life or health,” they wrote in their declarations. “But I will not accommodate a purely elective abortion that serves only to kill an unborn child that was conceived through an act of voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse.”
It’s hard to believe that these educators would dare to make such a declaration if they didn’t feel emboldened by the state’s rabid anti-abortion policies, which validate such self-appointed religious “enforcers” in the public sphere. That also happens to be the goal of a theocracy, which the state’s Republican Party as well as its donor base frankly acknowledge is their ultimate objective.
The fact that their lawsuit is brought by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal organization suggests how the institutionalization of forced birth and Christian zealotry in public education would be nationalized under a Donald Trump administration. America First Legal is a primary architect of the Heritage foundation’s “Project 2025,” the white nationalist template for Trump’s takeover plan of the federal government. So these lawsuits aren’t limited to Texas schools and hospitals: They are a blueprint intended for national application.
Similarly, the Texas Supreme Court’s decision upholding the state’s ban was championed and applauded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now on Trump’s short list to lead the Justice Department should Trump be elected in 2024. Paxton would be his point man on everything from banning abortion pills to defunding abortion providers to restricting access to contraception.
Of course, the Texas Supreme Court’s decision not have been possible without the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade—an action that Trump has taken credit for on multiple occasions.
The most dangerous aspect of what is occurring in Texas is that it is not intended to remain in Texas. It is a template for everything Trump and the Republican party intend to achieve on a national level, if voters give them the opportunity.
Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “teflon Don” is no more?
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