The Texas Observer

For the past five years, every legislative session, certain Republican legislators monkey with women’s health. These pro-life Republicans hate Planned Parenthood with a passion. On the Senate side, Senator Tommy Williams and Senator Bob Deuell have passed the most legislation undoing women’s health choices in Texas. On the House side we have Rep. Warren Chisum and Rep. Dan Gattis among others to thank for fewer health care options.

On Wednesday, the NARAL Pro-Choice Texas Foundation held a Capitol press conference to draw attention to one such travesty authored by Senator Williams. What his budget rider passed during the 2007 session did is funnel $5 million of our tax dollars from family planning services to unlicensed and un-regulated Crisis Pregnancy Centers. These centers are the ones that sponsor those billboards all over the state that read “Pregnant? In need of Help?” They usually have a picture of a weeping Madonna and an 800 number at the bottom.

Well, there’s your women’s health services funding going down the drain. And this is in a state where we rank No. 46 in the nation in women’s health. We are also No. 2 in teenage births and No. 5 in teenage pregnancies, according to a NARAL Pro-choice Texas Foundation report released at the press conference today. Crisis Pregnancy Centers are often staffed by non-medical volunteers and often heavily religious. Their services boil down to a hotline where they advocate against abortion and for adoption.

Last session, Sen. Deuell also diverted millions from family planning services to federally qualified health centers. While FQHC’s are great, they have no history of providing family planning services. As a result, they had to return a good portion of the state funding. “This should be about health care for women and not about Planned Parenthood the Corporation,” says Laurie Felker Jones, spokesperson for NARAL Pro-Choice Texas Foundation.

Even some pro-life supporters realize that these programs targeted at abortion clinics are instead hurting family planning and women across the state. At least 17,000 women could have received check ups and family planning services with the money that has been redirected to these crisis pregnancy centers.

Senator Judith Zaffirini, a pro-life Democrat says that after two years the program has clearly failed. “Crisis pregnancy centers have failed pregnant women by neglecting to provide recommended health and social services and failed pro-life supporters by directing funds away from the health care safety net that prevents unintended pregnancies and abortions. We need to re-direct these funds to evidence-based programs that improve women’s health.”

Heather Burcham, the woman who made multiple impassioned appearances at the Capitol to argue for the importance of the HPV vaccine, lost her battle with cervical cancer Saturday. She died in Houston at age 31.

Because of an initial misdiagnosis when she was 26, Burcham and her doctors didn’t discover the cancer until it was too late. She lived the final months of her life devoted to telling people about the dangers of HPV and cervical cancer, a devotion that landed her at the center of a political firestorm last legislative session.

“I don’t want to have lived in vain. I don’t want my life to have no purpose whatsoever,” she told ABC News in February, when she was named their Person of the Week. “And if I can help spread the word about cervical cancer, and the HPV vaccine, then I haven’t lived in vain.”

I remember seeing Burcham in the Capitol on several occasions. The first time I happened to sit behind her at a committee hearing, after she had just endured her first day in the media spotlight, doing photo ops with the governor and interviews with state outlets. The committee hearing started very late, and then the initial “expert” testimony ran for several hours. You could see the struggle Burcham was having with her body — exhaustion pressing heavier and heavier on her slender frame.

In the end, that night Burcham was outlasted by habitual sophists like Dennis Bonnen, whose bill led the charge against Perry’s vaccine mandate. Sometime around midnight, Burcham turned to the Perry staffers who had been accompanying and supporting her and indicated she just couldn’t hold out any longer.

(Whatever disagreements one can have with Perry over his handling of the vaccine or the cruelty of his beloved tort reform to limit the access patients like Burcham have to the judicial system, we respect the sincerity in his relationship with her.)

Hours later, hearing chairwoman Dianne White Delisi called out Burcham’s name to testify. It was early in the session at that point, but looking back I can remember no moment simply so sad as the silence when no response came. Delisi instructed the clerk to record Heather Burcham — against the bill, not testifying.

Near the end of the session, the governor played a personal message from Burcham at the press conference announcing he would not veto the bill blocking his vaccine mandate. The video is available on YouTube and embedded below. Observer coverage of the HPV saga is here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

The two most controversial abortion bills died tonight in the House. Speaker Tom Craddick sustained a day-old point of order on SB 785, killing the bill and possibly angering his pro-life base of support, although maybe he has bigger worries at the moment. The legislation would have required excessive and invasive abortion reporting and outed the judges that rule in sensitive judicial bypass cases.

Rep. Frank Corte pulled down SB 920 - Sen. Dan Patrick’s bill that would have required abortion providers to perform ultrasounds and possibly force a woman to review them - after it became clear the bill’s opponents would drag out today’s calendar until midnight to keep it from coming up. With today being the deadline for the House to pass Senate bills on second reading, SB 920 could have been the death of dozens of bills behind it on the calendar.

Corte was clearly not happy. After he pulled the bill down, he stormed out of the House chamber.

Perhaps wary of a restive House, Speaker Tom Craddick adjourned today after hashing out just one item on the Major State Calendar and before getting to a controversial pro-life bill. The adjournment came soon after Rep. Jim Dunnam hinted from the back microphone that the sudden appearance of SB 785 on today’s calendar was a form of political payola, in exchange for the pro-life movement’s badgering of members to support Craddick in a presumptive speaker’s race.

SB 785 – an abortion and judicial bypass reporting bill that restricts a woman’s access to abortion and could reveal how judges rule on cases to allow minors to obtain abortions – has been the number one objective of pro-lifers this session. After being voted out of House State Affairs May 7, the bill sat for a week without being sent to the Calendars Committee for consideration. It’s future seemed dim.
On Monday, as rumors swirled of a move to vacate the speaker’s chair and with Rep. Jim Keffer announcing that he’ll challenge the speaker, Texas Alliance for Life sent an email to members threatening that “We will score any vote to unseat the Speaker as an anti-life vote.”

On Tuesday, SB 785 was sent to Calendars and was placed on today’s Major State Calendar.

“[Craddick is] manipulating the calendar to try to save his skin, or save his gavel,” Dunnam charges. “He is rewarding [Texas Alliance for Life] for pressuring members.”

Hearing SB 785 on the floor will guarantee a harsh political debate that many a member would just as soon avoid. The bill’s opponents have amendments and points of order ready for tomorrow’s dispute. What will happen if a member has a valid point of order on the bill is anyone’s guess. If Craddick sustains the point and the bill dies, his pro-life allies will be displeased. If Craddick overrules the point, House Democrats and Republican moderates could rise up and reverse his ruling or even move to unseat him by calling to vacate the chair.

Today, in response to Dunnam’s floor inquiries, Craddick said he had never seen the Texas Alliance for Life email.

Two heavy-handed anti-abortion bills were set for the House’s Major State Calendar tomorrow in what was perhaps a political move by Speaker Tom Craddick to appease the GOP base.

Early this afternoon, House State Affairs Chairman David Swinford (R-Dumas) sent Houston Republican Sen. Dan Patrick’s SB 920 back to committee due to an error in the bill analysis. Swinford says he plans to vote the bill back out of committee today, but it won’t make the House floor by tomorrow.

That leaves SB 785 by Sen. Florence Shapiro (R-Plano), a bill that requires excessive reporting for abortions, abortion complications and judicial bypass case rulings. On the Senate floor, the bill was amended to require judicial bypass reporting by state rather than by county, avoiding the issue of outing judges who rule in those sensitive cases. The House State Affairs committee restored the bill to its original language, calling for reporting by county. In a state where 70 percent of the counties have only one or two judges, such reporting could easily reveal the identity of judges who grant judicial bypass to minors seeking abortions, and pro-lifers could target them in elections, or worse.

SB 920 would require abortion providers to perform ultrasounds, a practice that is already standard medical procedure in most cases. The Senate Health and Human Services committee amended the bill with the intention of giving a woman the option of viewing the sonogram rather than forcing her. The bill’s opponents say the language is ambivalent about whether or not a woman would have to look at the sonogram. Patrick said on the Senate floor that he hoped a woman would reconsider her decision to have an abortion after looking at the ultrasound.

Both bills seek to hinder a woman’s right to make this important decision without being coerced. Tomorrow’s debate could be interesting, as the bills’ opponents have some amendments in store. Rep. Ellen Cohen (D-Houston) says she plans to offer an amendment that would withdraw any reference in materials provided to women seeking abortions to the relationship between breast cancer and abortion. Studies clearly show that no such relationship exists, she says.

Speculating on the success of her amendment, Cohen says, “It depends if people are voting the issue based on medical information, or as a visceral response to how they feel about choice or anti-choice issues.”

Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio) says he’s planning amendments that will allow the House to debate the following: “Do we believe that women are capable of making healthcare decisions for themselves, and should the government support campaigns of misinformation?”

In an elaborate press conference today Rick Perry announced he would allow HB 1098, the bill blocking his HPV vaccine mandate, to go into law without his signature. His announcement came a matter of hours shy of the deadline to veto the bill. The governor said he knew the Legislature would simply overturn a veto, so he wasn’t going to drag out the conflict any longer.

In the speech before the announcement Perry got his licks in. He railed against the lawmakers who led the movement to overturn his mandate. The issue itself was “hijacked by politics and posturing,” Perry said. The governor had “never seen so much misinformation” in a debate. Women’s health was always his primary concern, he later said, but it was “sacrificed at the altar of political expedience.”

Addressing his critics, Perry said he was “mystified” by claims the vaccine would change teens’ sexual behavior. He said debate over parental control should have been a non-issue because of the opt-out clause. And his critics could not “genuinely” base their concerns on any sound science.

Probably most importantly, though, he said that if the conflict had been just about separation of powers — many claimed Perry was legislating from the executive office — then the Legislature would have done everything it could to improve access to HPV. Instead it included a rider in the budget prohibiting the state office of Health and Human Services from requiring the vaccine. “This is shameful,” Perry said.

Now, he did do all this while accompanied by five women affected by or working closely with HPV and cervical cancer (a couple of whom testified during committee hearings). The whole time, HB 1098 and two fancy pens were sitting on a desk next to the microphone stand, being conspicuously ignored. The only time he acknowledge the ceremonial blue folder was to dismiss it, as he concluded the conference with a video from a terminally ill young woman. He was giving Heather Burcham the last word because what she said would be “infinitely more important than anything written in that bill.” You could hear the sneer.

But given Perry’s power-grab track record this session, you can maybe see why lawmakers were concerned about this early reach. He also didn’t contact legislators with nearly identical bills prior to his bombshell announcement, as Jessica Farrar told us months ago. Their support could have perhaps facilitated some kind of compromise. And three words that were definitely not mentioned today were “Merck” and “Mike Toomey,” the vaccine’s manufacturer and their high-powered lobbyist, who happens to be Perry’s former chief of staff.

To his credit, Perry sounded passionate the entire time. The gov can put on quite a show.

Victoria Republican Rep. Geanie Morrison’s abortion and judicial bypass reporting bill, which accidentally died in committee two weeks ago, got its second chance last week. Rep. Bill Zedler (R-Arlington) folded Morrison’s bill into his House Bill 1131, a bill that originally required physicians to report seeing patients with complications due to abortions. The bill passed out of committee last week.

“Philosophically, Geanie and I on this issue are very agreeable,” Zedler said today.

HB 1131 now requires abortion patients to provide a laundry list of intrusive and unnecessary information, like the age of the father, how the procedure was paid for, and the source of referral for the abortion. The patient has the option of stating the reason for the abortion. Opponents say the bill is yet another effort to hinder a woman’s access to abortion. Physicians, insurance companies and places that refer women to abortion providers could all be targeted.

The bill also requires that rulings on judicial bypass cases be reported by county. In judicial bypass cases, a minor can bypass the parental consent law if a judge agrees that telling a parent of a decision to have an abortion may lead to abuse or abandonment. Opponents of the bill worry that disclosing rulings on such cases by county could make judges targets in election campaigns, or worse. Of Texas’ 254 counties, 45 percent have only one judge, and 70 percent have either one or two.

“I think this idea that somehow everybody’s going to know who it was if it’s by county- I think that argument is fallacious,” Zedler said, and then, letting his mask slip, he continued: “I think it’s very important that people know how judges are ruling on this issue.”

The Senate version of the bill, which passed out of the Senate last week, requires judicial bypass reporting by state rather than county, avoiding the whole outing of judges issues. That bill now awaits consideration in the House State Affairs committee.