POLITICS AUGUST 30, 2011
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In late May, Texas Governor Rick Perry made a proud speech to celebrate his signing of a new state law that requires women to get a sonogram before having an abortion. Flanked on both sides by gray-haired men in cowboy hats, Perry’s underscored just how little he thought of a woman’s right to choose: “Only when someone has access to all the facts, has a deep understanding of what’s at stake, can you make the right decision, and like many in the room today, I believe the right choice is life,” he declared.
But the fervor of the governor’s pro-life stance was expressed most succinctly not in his public remarks after the law’s passage, but in the extraordinary legislative maneuvering he used to enact it: By declaring passage of the law an “emergency”, Perry pushed it ahead of other pieces of legislation scheduled to be discussed by the Texas House of Representatives, and forced debates over real emergencies—like the jobs crisis, the state budget deficit, and out of control wild fires—to wait.
Against the backdrop of three wars and economic turmoil, it may seem quaint to focus on a presidential candidate’s stances on abortion. But Perry’s record on the issue is not just fodder for another round of battles in America’s culture war—it’s a genuinely troubling indication of his skewed priorities and distorted judgment. If his mission has been to restrict access to abortions in Texas, Perry has wildly overshot the mark, presiding over an aggressive unraveling of women’s access to basic health care. But those regressive effects actually seem to be a feature, not a bug, of the governor’s policies.
FEALTY TO THE pro-life lobby is practically a pre-requisite for Republicans running for office in Texas, but it’s Perry’s personalized commitment to the abortion issue that most troubles the state’s pro-choice advocates. One professional pro-choice advocate in Texas says, “What is terrifying about Rick Perry to us is he will work the abortion issue to his political advantage, but he also cares.” While other Republican candidates are certainly anti-choice, she insists that Rick Perry would be among the worst. “Since he has made this a personal priority for so long,” she continues, “I think he would be a great threat as an anti-choice advocate, a zealot even.”
Texan anti-abortion groups seem to agree with that assessment. They have been ardent supporters of Perry ever since 1999, when they vetted him during his run for lieutenant governor. Elizabeth Graham, the director of Texas Right to Life, says proudly of the governor, “There’s not much flipping and flopping.” The warm feelings are apparently mutual: Graham says she cannot remember a time when Perry declined to speak at an anti-choice event in Texas. He has also donated a tour of the governor’s mansion to another anti-abortion group, the Texas Alliance for Life, in 2005, and provided a recorded message for them to play at their last two annual fundraising benefits.
It was at the yearly anti-choice rally organized in January by the Texas Alliance for Life, which drew an estimated 3,000 people, that Perry announced his intention to make the sonogram bill an emergency measure. “In my estimation, the sanctity of human life is very dear to his heart,” says Joe Pojman, the executive director of Texas Alliance for Life. (George W. Bush, by contrast, never spoke at one of the rallies, though Pojman was quick to remind me that the former president and governor was also a true friend of the pro-life cause.)
Perry has made good not just with rhetoric, but with policy. Since becoming governor in 2000, Perry has not hesitated to push multiple anti-choice bills through an eager state legislature, making the record of his predecessor, George Bush, pale in comparison. One law signed by Perry required parental consent for abortions performed on minors unless they get a judicial waiver as victims of rape or incest; another requires counseling followed by a 24 hour waiting period in order to get an abortion; most recent was the onerous “emergency” law requiring a sonogram.
As anti-choice legislation goes, this latest law is particularly unusual. Oklahoma is the only other state with a similar law and it is currently facing a legal challenge in district court. The Texas sonogram law, which is also being challenged in court(a verdict is expected by Thursday, when the law is to take effect), is both disturbingly detailed and frustratingly vague. The law places an extraordinary logistical burden on women seeking abortions. After travelling—sometimes very long distances—to get a sonogram, a woman must now wait a full 24 hours before returning to the same clinic to get the abortion. (The waiting period for women who live more than 100 miles away is reduced to two hours). This will mean that many women seeking an abortion will have to take two days off of work or to find two days of childcare. Sarah Wheat, the interim chief executive of Planned Parenthood of the Texas Capital Region says the arbitrary time constraints don’t make women healthier or safer. “It is just a way of the government letting Texas women know what they think of their decisions,” she says.
But in addition to the complicated logistics, the law amounts to an absurdly invasive form of government intervention—one that adds physical discomfort and shame to the abortion process and dictates the manner with which a physician must perform a procedure and communicate with his patient. The doctor is forced to make an audible heartbeat available to the woman and provide a detailed verbal description of the fetus pictured in a sonogram. Theoretically, women are required to listen to the speech but can decline to hear the heartbeat and see the sonogram image.
Practically speaking, however, this is easier said than done, says Dr. Scott Spear, the medical director at Planned Parenthood. The law stipulates that the doctor is required to present the image and heart beat to her, which basically means that she would have to cover her eyes and plug her ears in order to shield herself from the material. “We are still debating among ourselves exactly what it means,” he says. “If I’m required to provide it, how does she choose not to hear it?” Despite the ambiguity, the consequences are strict: Doctors who don’t comply with the law face the prospect of losing their license to practice medicine.
To make matters worse, sonograms in the first trimester, when nearly 90 percent of abortions are performed, are usually done with a probe inserted into the vagina, an uncomfortable procedure that is not medically safe for the fetus in the early weeks, and which is usually not made available to a pregnant mother until the second trimester. Spear says that doctors may also have to extend the durations of these procedures longer than would otherwise be necessary in order to comply with the law’s demand that an audible heart beat be produced every time. “You have to have this conversation while [this probe] is in your vagina, its not like we can have pleasantries,” he told me. “You have to have a scripted conversation provided by politicians where you have to put your hands over your ears. That is not how we practice medicine. We try to make sonograms comfortable when it is required for a medical procedure, so this really has the effect of harassment.”
That Perry would make such a law a top legislative priority—one that mandates an invasive procedure against standard medical advice—is chilling. But equally disturbing is Perry’s support over the last several years for the decimation of women’s access to essential health services like cancer and STD screenings and birth control. In 2011, Perry presided over a two-thirds reduction in funding totaling about 62 million to family planning health clinics across the state that provide gynecological exams, STD tests, and birth control prescriptions, regardless of whether or not they provide abortions.
More than $60 million worth of the cuts to family planning services over the next two years came about because the Texas legislature redirected federal dollars toward other health care needs. Family planning’s funds were cut at the same time that Texas added money to an $8.3 million fund devoted to alternatives to abortion, a good portion of which goes to crisis pregnancy centers that counsel women not to have abortions but do not provide any medical services besides sonograms and pregnancy tests. In other words, these were budget choices made on the basis not of unavoidable austerity, but ideology.
The consequences of the de-funding is the shuttering of health clinics, some of which have already closed, says Fran Hagerty, head of the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas which provides support to many of the independent clinics. Hagerty says the cuts will lead to a public health crisis in Texas. “It means that women with cancer are going to be caught later and outcomes are not going to be as favorable,” she argues. “It’s going to mean that STD’s go untreated and spread, and the most ironic thing of all, that just makes me sick, is it means a rise of abortion.” Recent precedents aren’t encouraging: After a smaller round of family planning cuts in 2005, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin had to cut down its services one day a week, leading to 5,000 fewer cervical cancer screenings that year, according to Wheat.
The budget cuts are likely, in fact, to cost the state money. The Legislative Budget Board, a committee in the legislature that performs fiscal analysis of proposed legislation, estimated that 283, 909 low-income women will be denied family planning services in 2012-2013 as a result of the cuts, leading to about 20,511 additional births, at an average cost to Medicaid of $11,268 each, costing $231,117,948 for the births alone, irrespective of what the children will cost the state over time. A pap smear and birth control, by contrast, costs less than $200.
In our present atmosphere of federal austerity, decisions made in Washington are apt to have a great impact on women’s health issues in the years ahead. John Boehner’s proposal to cut funding to Planned Parenthood in April—an effort to which President Obama refused to capitulate—is just one example of how the federal government is considering ways to balance the budget at women’s expense. There is no way to know how Perry’s personal and political crusade against women’s reproductive health will manifest itself on a national stage if he is elected president, but it’s safe to say that most women would prefer not to find out.
Eliza Gray is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
16 comments
I just said that I am not a liberal in another comment to a different post. I will say again, as I say over and over, that I think abortion should be legal but rare. Liberals both for moral reasons and for practical reasons should avoid being complacent and self-congratulatory about abortion. We [human race, which I reluctantly pledge allegiance to] should strive to: Limit human population growth to save ourselves. ["Save the earth" is one of the stupidest slogans ever uttered.] Allow humans to enjoy sexual frolicking/release without dire consequences, such as not only unwanted pregnancies, but also STDs and emotional traumas. Avoid slippery slopes (besides vaginas] that lead to the devaluation of human life. Again, parse the following puzzle. On the one hand, only a religious nut considers birth control pills or "day after pills" as murder. [Yes, there are a lot of religious nuts out there besides Bachman and Perry.] On the other hand, only a person without much shred of decency would consider the killing a a child one day before it would be born as anything but murder. So with this slippery slope to navigate, we should err on the side of safe decency. Which I define as making abortion legal and rare, and not something to be taken lightly or complacently in the name of "liberalism" or words such as "choice." This is, and I joke not, one of the most difficult moral/political issues facing human beings.
- skahn
August 30, 2011 at 12:33am
skahn, you say that you are not a liberal, think abortion should be legal but rare, but are posting on a center left political site. The ultimate goal for a reluctantly pro-choice Democrat should be to have the fewest number of abortions possible. A nearly co-equal goal, if you are pro-life in any real sense of the term, is to ensure all necessary precautions are taken to preserve the life of the mother (since she, of course, is the person who can give birth to more children, but is also almost certainly and usually somewhat exclusively the caretaker of the baby anyway). Neither of these objectives are realized by total bans on abortion. Specifically, the closer you move to the pro-life camp, the greater the number of abortions and dangers to both mother and fetus you are willing to tolerate as things slip into a back-channel. And, of course, you have to be mindful of the fact that many of the people (perhaps not most, but many) who ardently push pro-life legislation are also animated by deeper anti-contraceptive ideology. This is important because it is a dormant fault that the American people are profoundly against, for good reason--such policies tend to lead to even more teenage births, dysfunctional families, and abortions than even plain vanilla anti-abortion policies. And you know that this is the ultimate agenda of a large portion of the pro-life pressure groups because there is close coordination with abstinence-only sex education, which may be traditionally and spiritually desirable, but has no basis in any scientific sense and has empirically led to a worsening of the very outcomes it is supposed to prevent. [Note: I don't like abortion personally, but observe that lots more places where it is non-problematic get along fine with lower abortion rates and fewer teenage pregnancies. Mostly Europe, but Texas's record is so bad that almost any state is better on these grounds. Thus, I would rather the Democratic Party was able to shape a consensus around the "legal but rare" perspective but realize that in the current environment, the other side is so rabid and unrealistic that my views align decently well with the Democratic mainstream on this.]
- chaitless
August 30, 2011 at 1:00am
Respectfully, skahn, says who? Says you? How many women do you know? I mean, really know? Are you a woman? Dare you presume to tell any of the rest of us how to deal with our own bodies and our own business and our own futures? This is a private matter, not for the state, not for busybodies with "moral" agendas. PS anybody who can mock efforts to save our planet qualifies as a busybody who should think a little harder before he/she pontificates about other people's uteri.
- Sophia
August 30, 2011 at 1:03am
...Are you a woman? Dare you presume to tell any of the rest of us how to deal with our own bodies and our own business and our own futures?... Yep. Especially at and after the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the body. Get what I mean, jelly bean?
- basman
August 30, 2011 at 6:59am
Great article. And wow--another body blow to Perry. That sonogram law, and his central role in it, is simply heinous. Between his antagonism toward entitlements, his violent rhetoric, and his inhumane policies, I'm astonished anyone on the Republican side thinks he would be a viable general election candidate.
- polcereal
August 30, 2011 at 10:37am
Eliza Gray claims to be worried about early sonograms in part because they are "not medically safe for the fetus." He does this in the name of defending women's reproductive rights to dispose of the fetus, a procedure which, by any measure, is the farthest thing from safety for the fetus.
- philipreed
August 30, 2011 at 12:23pm
Go Sophia! Wish I could email you my grad school history paper on Margaret Sanger - who had to fight, state by state, the late 19th century Comstock laws that had made contraception = pornography. That is why Griswold v CT is the landmark SCOTUS case, overturning the Connecticut law that prohibited doctors from prescribing contraception to married (male+female married) couples in 1965. America is doomed to repeat history over and over and over again. Throughout recorded history, women seek ways to control their reproductive life, including infanticide (ancient Greece as example). In today's America, this is a public health issue in that women should have access to safe and legal abortions. Period. This is also where I find the intrusion of church v state most troubling because a majority of global population have belief systems that do not define "life" the same way. What really ticks me off is how abortion has divided America almost as much as slavery once did, enabling both parties to focus the electorate away from so many other issues, like the economy, and wars. Looks like Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri are going even further than Texas: http://jurist.org/paperchase/2011/05/texas-governor-signs-law-requiring-sonogram-before-abortion.php If only the Democratic Party could protect women's reproductive rights AND get everyone back to work and paying taxes. The dilemma in 2012 will be that reproductive rights will not be enough to drive voter turnout for Obama, although it certainly worked in NYS in 2010 for Cuomo and Gillenbrand. Planned Parenthood deserves some of the blame. I used to be a regular donor until all they asked for was money for lobbying instead of money to operate their clinics.
- K2K
August 30, 2011 at 1:07pm
Chaitless, aside from your first sentence (which I am not sure the point of which I grasp) I think we are in agreement for the most part. Sophia How many women do you know? I mean, really know? Are you a woman? Dare you presume to tell any of the rest of us how to deal with our own bodies and our own business and our own futures? I am not a woman. I have never been tempted to get a sex-change operation. (See recent feature article on TNR.) I know my wife of 45 years, my daughter of 45 years, her partner of about twenty years (whom I call my "daughter out of law" as they have never tried to get "legally" married. I know their daughter born to DAL who is now seven years old. I hav two sisters... Oh, perhaps your question is rhetorical? Perhaps I should not answer literally? Seriously, I don't think I am "telling anybody what do do." I was mulling over a difficult ethical/moral issue. My wife is a fervent "abortion rights" advocate and has been so all her life. We did not intend to have children when we got married. We got pregnant (despite using birth control) on our honeymoon. My wife considered having an abortion and decided not to. After having two nearly grown children, my brother and his wife had an "oopsie" as they described it, a third child they did not intend to have. [His wife is a midwife and a nurse; I presume they know how to use birth control.] They considered having an abortion; they chose not to. Their son just entered college. I do not believe the state should interfere in the right to have an abortion. I am very uneasy about how China uses abortion as a method of birth control. I do not condemn or malign any one reading this who had an abortion at any time in their life. It is odd to me that evangelicals (although I am an non-believer, I have known and communicated with many evangelicals) are so emotional and fervent in regard to abortion. One reason, I have discovered, is that some evangelicals (who seem to worship babies and children as captive minds they can "infect" with their religious beliefs) try to have children and do not succeed or experience miscarriages and instead of blaming "God" (as perhaps they should) go nuclear against liberals, atheists, and abortionists. Sophia, I don't know if you read this far. I politely request that you re-read what I originally posted and respond to what I actually said. I do appreciate reading your comments and agree with many of them.
- skahn
August 30, 2011 at 1:31pm
Oh, dear. PS anybody who can mock efforts to save our planet qualifies as a busybody who should think a little harder before he/she pontificates about other people's uteri. Seriously, what does "save the planet" mean? I consider it quite likely that human beings will destroy ourselves (our species) by the end of this century. Wikipedia and other sources expand on the various ways this may happen. Despite human brilliance at destruction (perhaps our greatest skill) we cannot, even with all our H-bombs or whatever, remove our physical sphere from the solar system. After humans are gone, the planet (as a physical sphere) will remain. Some sort of plant and animal life will remain. Some sort of ecological system will remain, regenerate, and evolve, perhaps into some kind of "intelligent" life again. I am not a religious believer. That means I do not believe in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. It also means that I do not believe in Gaia, "mother nature," Wicca, and so on. As a practical matter, and as a method of trying to help our species survive, I think we should strive to maintain ecological health and variety. "Save the planet" to me is a religious statement similar to "Jesus Saves," and so on. If you will say that "Save the Planet" is your religious belief (something like a Catholic crossing herself), fine. If you claim it is a non-religious statement, I say it is a silly statement.
- skahn
August 30, 2011 at 1:46pm
Said about Perry: "the sanctity of human life is very dear to his heart.” That's not apparent when one considers the over 180 convicts he has allowed to be executed, even one who strong evidence contended was not guilty. Of this you can be confident: If ultra sound could predict the birth of a liberal, Perry would advocate abortion even more stridently than state's rights.
- Weston
August 30, 2011 at 2:43pm
I always found the phrase the "sanctity of human life" somewhat distasteful. I'd like to replace it with "empathy and compassion for life", including animal life, including all those creatures who run and crawl and hide under corners because, like us, they are scared to die. How chauvinistic to sanctify a mass of human cells while fattening and killing animals "industrially". But of course, Perry's and his ilk's stance has nothing to do with compassion nor sanctity -- witness their pleasure in inflicting the death penalty -- and everything to do with controlling women's sexuality. Which is one of the basic purposes of all religions.
- Idefix
August 30, 2011 at 4:22pm
Thanks K2K. skahn, respectfully I generally appreciate your commentary also - but - I think it's a little absurd to attack people for being "immoral" or not sufficiently agonized over abortion and at the same time mock phrases like "Save the Planet," which obviously are not intended as religious battle cries but rather to raise awareness about our environment. At this point in time we have exactly one viable planet and we are destroying it. I don't think THAT is moral. I don't think it is moral to mindlessly destroy plants, animals, entire species and at the same time put us, humans, in danger of extinction from stupidity, venality, inertia, human overpopulation and greed. Now, as to the comments about fetuses which (or who) are viable outside the body, this is not the real issue with anti-abortion zealots. You know that. Shifting the argument to late-term abortion or to fetuses which/who are viable outside the womb is beside the point and wrong. Moreover, cases of late term abortion are profoundly rare. Generally there is an issue to do with saving the mother's life, occasionally with infants who really are NOT viable and will die or suffer from birth defects. People as a rule don't go around seeking to terminate late pregnancies for fun. Nevertheless, it is profoundly wrong for anti-choice persons including the Church to go after mothers, fathers and doctors who are confronted with problems in the 3rd trimester and who have to make harsh decisions. Indeed the Catholics have punished a hospital and its administrators for saving the life of a mother in labor. This is truly medieval. I believe at least one person who saved the mother's life has been excommunicated. In Catholic theology she has been cast into the outer dark. Why? Because she saved a woman's life? PLEASE. Who is immoral? Furthermore, one could argue that we are now saving the lives of premature babies who really are TOO PREMATURE, who suffer horribly in the NICU, who don't live normal lives - in other words, if you really want to discuss morality, define "viable." Please, let's have that discussion. Modern, extreme medicine can indeed keep a truly non-viable fetus alive. Should it? Nevertheless, even a 9 month fetus can threaten the life of the mother. This happened to my mother with her first child. There was a choice, to save her life or that of the baby. To me this is NOT a moral issue. The mother's life is paramount, period; she is a full-grown human adult being. She is not a traveling womb. Nor should ANY woman die in childbirth. However, this tragedy occurred in a Catholic hospital and my mother would have died had her doctor and my father not been rational, compassionate human beings. The issue for the Catholics was to baptize the infant and let my mother die in agony, age 28. To me, this is zealotry and it is profoundly immoral. For one thing the infant would have died from his birth defects in any case - but I find that totally beside the point. At the time I was told this story I was a child and my brother's birth defects softened the issue for me and for my mother somewhat - but now, I honestly don't think that this should have made a difference. Her life was still paramount even if my brother had been 100% normal: nobody has the right to force a woman to die in childbirth, PERIOD. Secondly, my mother had two children subsequently and we and my sister's daughters never would have been born had she been killed in childbirth in order to baptize an infant who was killing her in the act of being born. The end.
- Sophia
August 30, 2011 at 4:37pm
well, hard to follow what Sophia just added, but, I will no longer solely cast my vote for president based on SCOTUS nominations, as I used to. I hope Ruth Ginsburg retires so that Obama fills the last spot - all the other SC justices are too young to worry about for the next 4-8 years. Meanwhile, I was a bit curious about Mrs. Anita Perry, the nurse, and the Perry children. I am having a difficult time reconciling the TONE of Eliza Gray's post here with the Perry's commitment to stopping violence and rape against women, and, Gov. Perry's most recent legislative accomplishment: criminal penalties for those engaged in human trafficking in woman and children. And, the Perry son Griffin's wedding to Meredith in December 2009, certainly looked like a wonderful celebration. Methodist Church. I am certain TNR will get around to demonizing Griffin Perry, Vanderbilt grad, for his job with Deutsche Bank once TNR runs out of other Perry-bashing.
- K2K
August 30, 2011 at 5:46pm
Sophia, thank you for your comment and reply. I read it carefully, and I will say that I think we are closer in our way of looking at this than seemed apparent at first. This is an awkward medium to communicate in when discussing difficult issues. After bearing five children, my mother had a miscarriage. A lovely woman I worked with lost her first child to miscarriage one day at work. My daughter's partner was artificially inseminated three times and lost the first two. The first time was a typical miscarriage; the second time they thought the baby was viable but after a couple of months it was clear it would not survive to birth and so it had to be aborted. After doctors discovered that the partner [my daughter--who can't bear children because of a childhood illness--is "Mama" and the birth mother is "Mommy"] was allergic to her fetuses, medication and total bed rest until delivery ensured that baby # three (who is now our 7 year old granddaughter and doing fine) was safely delivered. Birth and death are very basic parts of human life as individuals and as societies and we react strongly and emotionally when we think about and discuss these issues. Again, I appreciate your comments and thoughts, and think it best if I refrain from any further comments in this thread. See you around the comment threads.
- skahn
August 31, 2011 at 12:31am
k2k, it's called eliminating the competition. Even thieves don't like to have their stuff stolen, ya know?
- GSpinks
August 31, 2011 at 10:56am
good one gspinks:) Perry just made abortion and federal judges a campaign issue - guess he wants to steal Santorum's supporters without being as rigid "...Judge Sam Sparks ruled late Tuesday that the law violates the free speech rights of doctors and patients, and he ordered the state not to impose penalties against doctors who don’t fulfill its requirements, the Houston Chronicle reports. “The Act’s onerous requirements will surely dissuade or prevent many competent doctors from performing abortions, making it significantly more difficult for pregnant women to obtain abortions,” wrote Sparks, granting a temporary injunction to block the law. The suit, which was filed on behalf of doctors and medical clinics, contends that the new abortion measure violates physicians’ free-speech rights by requiring them to deliver “politically motivated” messages and further that the law could put doctors cross-wise with the wishes of their patients. But supporters of the Texas law say it would allow women to be better informed. While a sonogram is required under the law, a woman may turn her head and choose not to see it. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said he would appeal the ruling. “Every life lost to abortion is a tragedy, and today’s ruling is a great disappointment to all Texans who stand in defense of life,” Governor Rick Perry said. “This important sonogram legislation ensures that every Texas woman seeking an abortion has all the facts about the life she is carrying and understands the devastating impact of such a life-changing decision.” Sparks let stand the law’s requirement that sonograms be performed at least 24 hours before an abortion, unless the patient lives 100 miles or more from the nearest provider, according to the Chronicle. In that case, the wait would be shortened to two hours." http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/08/31/federal-judge-blocks-new-texas-abortion-law/
- K2K
August 31, 2011 at 1:22pm