More women join lawsuit challenging Texas’ abortion laws
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Texas Republicans Propose Horrific Punishment for Abortion Patients
The Lone Star State GOP wants to make abortion punishable by death.
Texas Republicans Propose Horrific Punishment for Abortion Patients
Ellie Quinlan HoughtalingThu, May 30, 2024 at 12:06 PM EDT·2 min read
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Having some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws isn’t enough for the Texas GOP. Instead, Republicans in the Lone Star State are actually considering the death penalty as punishment for people who undergo the medical procedure.
A new platform proposed at the state’s GOP convention on Saturday included calls for legislation that would transform the fetal personhood ideology into law, which would effectively categorize any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer.
The 50-page document claims that “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide” and calls for lawmakers to extend “equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.”
Not everyone in attendance was in support of the endeavor, however. Harris County Precinct 178 Chair Gilda Bayegan volunteered to speak at the event, calling on her party to drop its anti-abortion platforms on the basis that the state’s draconian restrictions to the medical procedure were alienating its base.
“I’m up here begging you not to make it one of our priorities,” Bayegan said.
Her party clearly did not listen. The GOP wish list is a revealing glimpse into which direction they are headed, but it wasn’t the first clue. In January, Hood County Republican Party officials were spotted attending an Abolish Abortion Texas function in which the death penalty was discussed as a possible repercussion for women and minors who seek out not just abortion but also in vitro fertilization treatments.
“There’s no difference in the value of born people and preborn people,” Paul Brown, the group’s director, said in leaked video footage, revealing the philosophy behind the extreme measures. “In short, abortion is murder. And that’s starting at the moment of fertilization even prior to implantation. So that Plan B pill, or what’s known as the morning-after pill, which is used to terminate or kill a baby prior to implantation, that is an abortion.”
(Plan B does not “kill” an embryo, as Brown claims. Instead, it prevents fertilization from occurring in the first place.)
Texas isn’t the only state to consider classifying the lifesaving medical procedure as homicide or even sentencing people to death for seeking the treatment. Republican lawmakers in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina introduced similar legislation last year. All of those bills were defeated, with even some state Republicans deeming them too extreme.
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