Now that she’s getting hammered:
After leading a 13-hour filibuster against an omnibus abortion bill last June, Texas Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis now says that she would support a 20-week ban on abortion that pays more deference to a woman and her doctor.
She said she would have supported a bill that included only a 20-week ban, but that the other provisions — restrictions on abortion providers and clinics — majorly obstructed access to the procedure.
“It was the least objectionable,” Davis told The Dallas Morning News regarding a bill that contained the 20-week ban. “I would have and could have voted to allow that to go through, if I felt like we had tightly defined the ability for a woman and a doctor to be making this decision together and not have the Legislature get too deep in the weeds of how we would describe when that was appropriate.”
The current ban provides exemptions for fetal abnormalities and cases in which the mother’s life is in danger, but Davis said those provisions do not go far enough.
“My concern, even in the way the 20-week ban was written in this particular bill, was that it didn’t give enough deference between a woman and her doctor making this difficult decision, and instead tried to legislatively define what it was,” Davis told the paper.
President of anti-abortion organization Susan B. Anthony List Marjorie Dannenfelser said that Davis’s pivot signals “political desperation.”
More at Politico
My late mom’s doctoral dissertation was on the subject of legal loopholes and abortion.
In it, she proved that, depending on whatever was legal in any of the various states, that exemption was statistically bumped by doctors there in giving abortions to pregnant women who wanted one for whatever reason.
So, where only the life of the mother was a legal road to abortion, a disproportionate number of women had their lives at grave risk.
Where other things were also allowed, the numbers evened out to a more balanced proportion.
In states where it was terribly difficult to get abortions a lot of women were given ”d&c’s” because of irregular periods or bleeding. Vague enough to where a missed period (a pregnancy) qualified as irregular bleeding.
My point is, when a woman wants to terminate her pregnancy, she always can.
Just probably not at a Catholic hospital.