“Deceit, Deception and Bald Faced Lies”
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:38 pm
The House State Affairs committee heard 11 hours of testimony Monday night on nine abortion related bills, including a trigger law that would ban abortions in Texas if Roe v. Wade were overturned. Other legislation would simply encumber a woman’s access to abortion. House Bill 1750, for example, requires excessive and invasive abortion reporting that could lead to the identification and targeting of physicians that perform abortions and judges that provide consent for minors to get abortions in judicial bypass cases.
The debate was a breeding ground of finger pointing, with some of the most outrageous allegations spawned by our elected representatives themselves. Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Center) accused Planned Parenthood of selling defective condoms in order to make money on abortions. Among the three Planned Parenthood clinics in Austin, 98 percent of their clients receives birth control services or preventative healthcare such as pap smears, while 3 percent get an abortion. Family planning clinics do more in prevention measures to put abortion providers out of business than any trigger law ever will.
Rep. Bill Zedler (R-Arlington) accused Time Magazine of “deceit, deception and nothing but bald faced lies” in reference to a February article about crisis pregnancy centers. Zedler condemned Planned Parenthood for “pushing nothing but abortion.” State law requires that a family planning clinic counsel a patient on all three of her options when facing an unintended pregnancy, said Laurie Felker Jones, who testified on behalf of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. On the other hand, crisis pregnancy centers, which are set to receive another $5 million in state government money over the next two years, must be pro-life facilities to receive funding, and therefore do not give women information about their full range of options.
Zedler also said that maternal death is “no minor problem” in abortions. In reality, fewer than .6 in 100,000 abortion procedures in the U.S. result in death, while less than 1 percent leads to major complications, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Rep. Geanie Morrison (R-Victoria) defended her reporting bill, saying that aggregate reporting by county of judicial bypass cases would not lead to identification of specific judges and their rulings. “I would think there would be more than one or two [judges in a county],” she said. Of Texas’ 254 counties, 45 percent have one judge, and 70 percent have either one or two.
Abortion providers and pro-choice advocates especially dislike being required by law to provide false information to patients considering an abortion. As part of the “Woman’s Right to Know Act”, authored by Rep. Frank Corte (R-San Antonio) in 2003, abortion providers must offer women a booklet that, aside from showing pictures of embryos and fetuses at varying weeks of gestation, asserts a possible increased risk of breast cancer after an abortion. The National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society both concluded that having an abortion does not increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.
What should be done in the face of misleading information? “We always want to err on the side of life,” said Rep. Dan Flynn (R-Van). “Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:37 pm
This from the same folks that killed the HPV vaccine mandate? But of course.
April 18th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
[…] David Swinford (R-Dumas) did not call for a vote on several other abortion-related bills that were heard with these two bills in the beginning of April, some of which would have eased the obstacles placed […]