Politics and Abortion

 

Zigging and Zagging doesn’t diminish Wendy Davis’ radical position on abortion

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion Texas State Senator Wendy Davis

Well…what is it that pro-abortion “icon” Wendy Davis is now saying about abortions performed after 20 weeks? Or, asked differently, what does this headline from the pro-Davis Dallas Morning News suggest: “Wendy Davis backs 20-week abortion ban that defers to women.” (Hint: it is deliberately obscure because Davis has no intention of softening her position on her signature issue.)
You remember that as a state Senator Davis made her bones last year with an 11 hour filibuster that temporarily stymied passage of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act in Texas.
But that was then—when she was an obscure legislator—and now she is all but assured to be the Democratic candidate for governor against pro-life Attorney General Greg Abbott. So, without backing off an inch, Davis is, not surprisingly, repacking a position that is opposed by an overwhelming majority of Texans without changing the contents.

The Dallas Morning News did not provide a transcript so you have to kind of guess what was really said to the editorial board. Here’s the opening sentence, which is a summary paraphrase:

“Wendy Davis said Tuesday that she would have supported a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, if the law adequately deferred to a woman and her doctor.”

The story, written by Gromer Jeffers Jr., begins by telling us that Davis told the editorial board how rare such abortions, that “most of them” were “were in cases where fetal abnormalities were evident or there were grave risks to the health of the woman” (another paraphrase).

After suggesting that “I would line up with most people in Texas who would prefer that that’s not something that happens outside of those two arenas,” she told the board (according to Jeffers) that the exceptions weren’t sufficient, thus, “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.”

Having said that—the measure didn’t give her the kind of law where the exceptions swallow the rule–later in the story we read this paraphrase: “Davis said she could have supported a bill that contained only a 20-week ban, but the law’s restrictions on clinics and doctors have greatly curtailed access to the procedure in parts of Texas.”

Oh, so her real objection was to other portions of what Jeffers describes as a “sweeping bill”—for example, upgrading the requirements abortion clinics must meet and ensuring that abortionists have admitting privileges in a local hospital if they botch an abortion?
Of course not (although she opposed those, too).

In the next sentence (and in her own words), we read

“It was the least objectionable,” she said. “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 last couple of days her legion of pro-abortion scribes have alternated between accepting this as realpolitik—you gotta do what you gotta do in a very Red State— feigned indignation that she might be ever-so-slightly backsliding—and unbridled admiration that Davis is so clever she’ll confuse those pro-life rubes.

Not a chance. Pro-lifers, first in Texas but also all across America, know exactly why the Abortion Establishment has already raised millions for Davis’ campaign against pro-life Attorney General Greg Abbott: she is one of them.

Source: NRLC News