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:
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.
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.
At its convention last month, the Texas Republican Partycalledfor 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.