Legal advocates and organizations have filed an emergency appeal to prevent a Texas law banning the vast majority of abortions from taking effect today, but the Supreme Court has not acted on the appeal and the law went into effect after midnight last night.
Rather than using the state's authority to enforce a ban on abortion, the Texas laws effectively deputizes anti-abortion activists to enforce it themselves by giving them the legal power to sue anyone involved in an abortion.
Now, unfortunately, there's no shortage of assholes who would use this law to control the lives of others.
“As of now, most abortion is banned in Texas,” said Marc Hearron, a lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a call with reporters Wednesday. [...]
Late into the night Tuesday before the ban took effect clinics were filled with patients, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Women’s Health, which has four abortion clinics in Texas.
Twenty-seven women were still in the waiting room after 10 p.m. at one clinic, leaving doctors crying and scrambling over whether they would see all of them in time, she said. The last abortion at one of her clinics finished at 11:56 p.m. in Fort Worth, where Hagstrom Miller said anti-abortion activists outside shined bright lights in the parking lot after dark looking for wrongdoing, and twice called police.
The arrogance and audacity required to do this is something that's beyond my comprehension, but I can relate to what some people in Texas are undoubtedly feeling today.
In a prior lifetime, I could not say I know what it feels like to watch others exert control over your body, but now I do. And it's not as if I was ignorant or did not understand, but being a transgender women is eye opening in many ways and one of them is making it hit closer to home when lawmakers legislate control over what women do with their own bodies.
An attack on any woman's body is an attack on all women's bodies. The same line of thinking is used to justify all of the above and some of the rhetoric used to support bans on abortion and transgender health care is even the same. It's 'not safe,' lawmakers say, even though they have zero qualifications to say so.
My advice to women in Texas is to do whatever you need to do but be as safe as possible when you do.