It's impossible for me to be an education blogger here in Texas and to not post on Senate Bill 8, the state’s anti-abortion law.

My women friends from throughout the country call me in disbelief, wondering how in the heck we got to this place in Texas. It's agonizing and horrific the cruelty we see masquerading as deliberative policy when it's not. Shame on the U.S. Supreme Court for their silence on this issue when they had a chance to do something. Shame on our governor and on Texas legislators for being complicit in this attack on women.

I am glad to see that Attorney General Merrick Garland with the U.S. Department of Justice will explore all options to challenge Texas' SB 8. This op-ed by Sharon Grigsby sheds excellent light on just how extreme our state's republican party is.  Key quotes:

This law isn’t about protecting either vulnerable women or unborn babies. It’s about protecting politicians who are scared of getting out-righted in the next primary.

In pursuit of staying in power, Republican leaders have deputized Texans to do their dirty work — and shield them from complicity. 

What troubles me most about the ruling party of Texas — and the voters who keep them in power — is their adherence to being pro-birth but not so much pro-life.

Several of us in the community met this evening. Everyone's pretty stressed with the extremism that's taken ahold of our state. Our work and advocacy are not for the faint in heart. 

-Angela Valenzuela

My early-pregnancy miscarriages changed my views on abortion. But then came Texas’ SB 8

Trying to outlaw abortion at six weeks by asking citizens to spy on their neighbors is just a bridge too far.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the Texas Capitol in Austin in May to show their concern about restrictive abortion legislation that was headed to Gov. Greg Abbott's office. The law, which bans almost all abortions in the state, went into effect Sept. 1.(Sergio Flores / TNS)

By Sharon Grigsby 12:06 PM on Sep 7, 2021

In six pregnancies, in my late 20s and early 30s, I lay on the OB-GYN’s examining table as his ultrasound machine looked for cardiac activity in my womb.

Each time, the first-trimester images showed the beginning of a new life growing inside me.

As much as I wanted to dance with delight, I mostly felt fear over what the next doctor’s appointment might reveal.

Complications developed in four of my pregnancies and follow-up sonograms showed a picture that even my untrained eye couldn’t mistake:

The embryo’s development had stopped. The cardiac activity had ceased.

Each of those losses left me wanting to die.Today I am the lucky mother of two sons, the first one born after three miscarriages and the second born after a fourth.

But my grief over those tiny creatures that didn’t make it out of the first trimester left me knowing that — despite wanting only two children — I would have a hard time choosing abortion if I ever became pregnant again.

After a lifetime of being ardently pro-choice and considering abortion as a comforting safety valve — albeit a decision that I somehow escaped having to confront — I was a lot less sure of what I believed.

So it was with a lot of conflicting emotions that I came to the Texas Legislature’s attempt to end abortion. I suspect a lot of you feel the same, even as you avoid speaking up in the din of voices who are Just So Sure.

A sign at the Whole Woman’s Health Clinic in Fort Worth last Wednesday, the day that Senate Bill 8 went into effect in Texas.(Elias Valverde II / Staff Photographer)

For a variety of reasons — as frequently social and political as religious — abortion is far more polarizing today than it was even at the time Roe was enacted.

I honestly think there is little room for persuasion given the deeply emotional associations now in play.

For anti-abortion forces, this issue is about children — helpless babies, just like their own babies or the children they love.

For the choice side, it represents the fragile autonomy women have fought so long to achieve from the edict that, because of biology, we are not entitled to the same rights and privacy as men.

Bottom line: The issue is about two different things with two different constituencies and two battle cries — “women’s body, women’s choice” and “it’s a baby, don’t kill it.”

That’s the reflexively righteous society we live in, one without room for nuance. No one has the patience to ask questions. No one reads something to have his or her mind changed.

There are as many opinions about the central question of abortion — at what point does life begin — as there are variables in every pregnancy. No issue is more in need of thoughtful discussion — not least of all because it involves a one-of-a-kind situation, a body housing what will eventually become another body.

Instead, we have Texas lawmakers and leaders throwing gas on the fire and building a flaming pile of damaging precedents that are going to backfire on all of us.

I believe a mother’s rights decrease with a baby’s development, but outlawing abortion at six weeks — and no exceptions for rape or incest — moves the line way too far back. It leaves women having to decide something they don’t even know they need to decide.

It’s also a legal trick that evades judicial review by design, a tactic that even for those of us inhabiting that squishy middle is clearly wrong.

Women in Texas have been battling the erosion of abortion rights for almost two decades. This 2015 rally by students and abortion rights activists on the steps of the Texas Capitol in Austin protested previous restrictions put in place by the state Legislature.(Eric Gay / AP)

This law isn’t about protecting either vulnerable women or unborn babies. It’s about protecting politicians who are scared of getting out-righted in the next primary.

In pursuit of staying in power, Republican leaders have deputized Texans to do their dirty work — and shield them from complicity.

By encouraging busybodies to go after people who “aid and abet” abortions, those in charge threaten to turn Texas into a modern-day East Germany, where the Stasi bribed citizens to inform on their neighbors.

A day is coming when Roe v. Wade will be argued out in the huge and very public forum that the Supreme Court allows.

What Texas has done in the meantime — scaring people into compliance with its legal trickery and spies-and-snitches mechanism — is an ill-advised detour.

It also has pushed me — and who knows how many others — out of the murky middle in this consequential debate. All of us, no matter our views on abortion, need to think hard about the means to which we are willing to resort to achieve an end.

What troubles me most about the ruling party of Texas — and the voters who keep them in power — is their adherence to being pro-birth but not so much pro-life.

The most recent national Kids Count report, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, ranked Texas as the fifth-worst state in the nation for children.

Our state has consistently ranked in the bottom half of the U.S. for the past decade in nearly every indicator for children’s well-being, including health coverage, foster care, education and economic equity.

What about the safety net for all the women now forced to carry their babies to full term and the most vulnerable of all — unwanted children?

For now, doctors are left unsure about their relationships with patients — what can they safely say when discussing options and how can they know they aren’t talking to a wanna-be bounty hunter hoping to claim a $10,000 “reward”?

What’s the risk for the friend from whom a pregnant woman sought advice? The school counselor, the religious leader, the Uber driver, even the phone company that provided the line used to set up an appointment?

A billboard put up in 2018 by the Dallas-based Afiya Center proclaimed "abortion is self-care" and included the hashtag #TrustBlackWomen. This billboard was in response to another one, from the Black Pro Life Coalition, that proclaimed "abortion is not healthcare."(Irwin Thompson / Staff Photographer)

For women facing complicated pregnancies or tests that show their child can’t survive outside the womb, this new law makes a difficult situation untenable.

What of the hospital committees that have traditionally supported a mother’s wishes and approved medical terminations after ultrasounds reveal complications certain to end in a stillbirth or death hours after a baby is delivered?

Wrestling with an abortion is a terrible lot with all sorts of circumstances that make each decision different.

For people like me, who believed that some of the restrictions placed on abortion in the past two decades were reasonable, Senate Bill 8 is a call to action. It’s a reminder that my own internal conflict — which results in not taking a stand — is complicit in allowing these laws to take effect.

We have to trust each individual woman to make the decision that’s best for her. Not the government and not random individuals, especially vigilantes.

The Racist Origins of 'Pro-Life' Abortion Movement They Never Talk About, by Wagatwe Wanjuki, July 10, 2018

Wagatwe Wanjuki  

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday July 10, 2018 · 10:36 AM Central Daylight Time

Fundamentalist Christians and [the KKK] are pretty close, fighting for God and country. Someday we may all be in the trenches together in the fight against the slaughter of unborn children. — John Burt, 1994 New York Times interview

Reversing Roe v. Wade goes against the will of the people. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that a clear majority support the Supreme Court ruling ensuring a patient’s access to abortion care. That, of course, won’t stop opponents to the measure from ruling by minority; it’s exactly what the so-called “pro-lifers” want.

Rule by minority has increasingly become the Republican’s modus operandi; gerrymandering, voter suppression, and congressional loopholes show they are not shy about staying in power by any means necessary. Now we’re seeing what’s possible when a man like Donald Trump embraces it as the leader of the power. Trump has not hesitated to embrace white nationalists and give racists power—just look at Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions—which is exactly why it’s prime time for Roe v. Wade to come up on the chopping block.

It’s no coincidence that the biggest national threat to abortion rights since Roe is happening under such a racist government. Have you ever wondered why the “pro-life” movement is so … white? Or perhaps you’ve noticed that they seem incapable of not being racist whenever they pretend to care about Black people to further their extreme agenda.

You’re not alone. It turns out that the pro-life movement has been very good about hiding its racist origins. That’s not just because white people tend to be uncomfortable and avoidant when talking about race. It’s because it also exposes the true goal of the movement, which makes their initially confusing hypocrisy incredibly clear.

Abortion restrictions have always been political—and about race

Madame Restell, née Ann Lohman

During much of the 19th century, abortion was unregulated and business was booming. The industry was doing so well that one famous provider, Madame Restell, invested in one of New York City’s first luxury apartment buildings with her husband. The white, middle-class women who could afford abortions were having more control of their bodies and thus having fewer children. This was all happening while the United States was also getting more Catholic and Jewish immigrants.

The fears of white women increasingly turning away from doing their “duty” to bear children coupled with xenophobia compelled powerful white men to spring into action. Under the guise of wanting to require a medical license to perform abortions, the American Medical Association (AMA) ran a successful campaign to ban abortion care and put the decision to make exceptions completely in their hands. How did they succeed? They appealed to the racist little hearts of Anglo-Saxon politicians.

Back then, “pro-life” racism wasn’t as subtle. The authors of “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America” in the American Sociological Review wrote that “physicians argued that middle-class, Anglo-Saxon married women were those obtaining abortions, and that their use of abortion to curtail childbearing threatened the Anglo-Saxon race.” Take this excerpt from a book by Dr. Augustus K. Gardner from 1870, for example:

Infanticide is no new crime. Savages have existed in all times, and abortions and destruction of children at and subsequent to birth have been practiced among all barbarous nations of antiquity … The savages of past ages were not better than the women who commit such infamous murders to-day, to avoid the cares, the expense or the duty of nursing and tending a child.

Here we see how framing abortion as murder came from racist propaganda. Dr. Gardner talked about barbaric peoples—Indians, Greeks, and Chinese, for example—that supposedly partook in infanticide. He uses this in an attempt to shame women from seeking abortions, calling them no better than these “savages.” Political anti-abortion rhetoric began with this message: abortion is for other people. Non-white people.

Yet even back then, there was no consensus among conservatives or Christians about abortion’s morality. However, the disproportionate amount of power that rich white men had in the country—as doctors and politicians—allowed this minority to execute its will on the people (sound familiar?).

The truth about conservative hate of Margaret Sanger—and contraception

Margaret Sanger

While the 19th century racists succeeded in getting a nationwide abortion ban, that pesky desire from women for autonomy kept rearing its head. It’s almost as if you keep oppressing people, they will eventually want more rights—no matter how hard you try!

No wonder they hated Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. She published a feminist magazine in 1914  that advocated for reproductive freedom—exactly what racist white men didn’t want embraced by women. The smears and attacks against her continue today as conservatives try to paint her as the racist. The truth is that she was a proponent of eugenics, but was staunchly against its use for racist means. At the Jewish Woman’s Archive, Open Society Institute fellow Ellen Chasler explains:

She distinguished between individual applications of eugenic principles and cultural ones and spoke out against immigration prohibitions that promoted ethnic or racial stereotypes with a biological rationale. She saw birth control as an instrument of social justice, not of social control.”

In fact, Sanger worked with activists of color like W.E.B. Du Boisand Japanese feminist Shizue Kato—people conservatives today would undoubtedly disparage. Dr. Martin Luther King even once said, “There is a striking kinship between our [civil rights] movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts in “Family Planning—A Special and Urgent Concern.”

While there’s no excuse for Sanger’s support of the eugenics movement, it does show that the fact was distorted by a white racist movement that undoubtedly has people who would agree with her eugenic statements today.

Even in Sanger’s time, white supremacists still couldn’t agree on whether to support birth control or not. Some saw it as a possible means to keep “undesirables” from reproducing, while other had fears that Anglo-Saxon white women would embrace it too much and significantly lower their birth rate.

Tools of white supremacy: from school segregation to abortion

Abortion became a political tool of racist white evangelicals as a response to the Black civil rights movement of the 1960’s. Displeased with forced school integration and other signs of Black people being treated like human beings, the founders of the modern anti-choice movement sought to find an issue to mobilize the conservative base. With enough grassroots support, white evangelical leaders could get people who’d Make America Explicitly Racist again in power and protect its white people as they saw fit. 

Jerry Falwell speaks at a Christians United For Israel news conference.

One of these leaders is preacher Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty University: he hated Dr. King and all this civil rights expansion. In response to Brown v. Board of Education, he created private, white-only Christian schools to try and preserve segregation. It worked for a while, but the government started cracking down on the schools explicitly made just for white children.

In hopes of reversing this wave, evangelicals had thrown their weight behind President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and fellow evangelical Christian, for the 1976 election. Unfortunately for Falwell and friends, Carter wasn’t also a racist. Under Carter’s watch, the crackdown on white schools continued.

Activist Paul Weyrich had long suggested using abortion as their political issue. Now that school segregation had failed, leaders like Falwell and Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson agreed to join forces to usher in a new era in white supremacist political activism: the pro-life movement.

While Roe v. Wade was already years old, they tested using the “pro-life” political stance as a way to get candidates who’d do their racist bidding in office during the midterm elections—and it worked. They won three Senate seats and a governorship thanks, in part, to low turnout from Democrats and high energy from the white evangelicals. They found a winning issue and took it to the national stage next.

How racism brought Republicans and white evangelicals together

President Reagan and Jerry Falwell in the Oval Office.

Evangelical leaders tried to influence Carter to seek a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. He refused, so they looked to the other party. The Republican Party’s sexism dovetailed nicely with racist anti-abortion policies and support for such an amendment was made a part of the party’s platform. And thus, the GOP officially adopted the language proposed by the power-hungry white evangelicals and officially became the “pro-life” party with candidate Ronald Reagan as the leader.

Reagan was a good bet. He had name recognition with his acting career before entering politics. And, like Falwell and friends, Reagan lamented the advancement of the civil rights for Black people. Reagan had no problem catering to racists, pushing the “welfare queen” myth and calling the Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South.” Oh, and he was endorsed by the KKK—twice.

At first glance, Reagan seemed to be the least likely ally for the anti-choice movement. When he was California’s governor, he signed the country’s least restrictive abortion access bill in the country. Carter had a documented history of being anti-abortion, both in his personal and political life. However, it’s Carter’s refusal to bend to the political will of the powerful white evangelical men that was seen as the biggest liability.

Reagan’s landslide win solidified the religious right’s political strength. Falwell, Dobson, and Weyrich had succeeded in making their racist political goals viable enough to get millions to vote for their preferred candidate who’d get rid of abortion and keep the brown and Black people from taking over. Since then, the political power of white evangelicals in the United States has only gotten stronger.

Today’s political mess in perspective

There’s a reason why the pro-life advocates and #alllivesmatter crowd has been silent at best about the mistreatment of children at the border at the hands of the administration. They’re not the members of a human rights movement; it’s just what they say to convince clueless white people. The pro-life movement is white nationalist campaign that will use any messaging or backward logic necessary to achieve their genocidal goals.

This puts white evangelicals’ nearly unwavering support of Trump into perspective. They put up with his very un-Christian behavior because he’s a very effective vessel for their racist political goals. It is increasingly clear that the goal of the pro-life leaders is to dominate our politics; they don’t want true democracy. Instead, a few white men want to exploit the system as much as possible until they can once again live in a country where women don’t control their bodies, immigration doesn’t happen, and people of color are not truly citizens.