The Texas Observer

Due to a technical blunder, two anti-abortion bills died despite overwhelming support in the House State Affairs Committee. House Bill 175, a trigger ban on abortion in Texas should Roe v. Wade be overturned, and House Bill 1750, an abortion and judicial bypass reporting bill, had the support of seven of the 9-member committee and were expected to pass. They only received a vote of 4-to-2, just one short of the five needed to pass them out of committee.

The committee’s chairman Rep. David Swinford (R-Dumas) called the vote in an April 18th meeting on the House floor upon adjournment. Though he saw seven members present, only six had in fact been recorded as present in the roll call, Swinford says.

“It was my fault,” Swinford says. “It was unintentional.” The bills can only be reconsidered at the request of one of the opposing votes, who have decided not to do so, he says.

The bills could prevail through their identical versions in the Senate. Plano Republican Sen. Florence Shapiro’s abortion and judicial bypass reporting bill is expected to be considered on the Senate floor today. An abortion trigger ban by Houston Republican Dan Patrick (R-Houston) has not yet been heard in committee.

Another abortion bill by Patrick passed out of the Health and Human Services Committee yesterday, with a few hastily-written amendments proposed by committee members. The original bill would have required women considering an abortion to view an ultrasound. With the amendments, the bill requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound, explain it to the patient, and give her the opportunity to see it, though she may choose not to. Only Sen. Eliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso) voted against the bill.

“One a practical level, this bill really just states what is already practiced,” says Sarah Wheat, public affairs director for Planned Parenthood of the Texas Capital Region. Ultrasounds are a part of appropriate abortion care, and some women choose to see the sonogram while some do not, she says.

Staunchly pro-life Patrick has proposed other bills to discourage women from getting an abortion, like his so-called adoption incentive bill, by which Texas would pay women considering abortion $500 to choose adoption.

“These bills don’t prevent one unintended pregnancy,” Wheat says.

House State Affairs voted out of committee two abortion-related bills today - a trigger law that would automatically ban abortions in Texas if Roe v. Wade were overturned, and an abortion and judicial bypass reporting bill that would require excessive reporting from doctors who perform abortions, and could lead to the outting of judges who rule in sensitive and confidential judicial bypass cases.

Committee chairman Rep. 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 in front of women facing unintended pregnancies.

They are:

House Bill 1760 by Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston): Doctors would no longer have to inform abortion patients of a mythical correlation between breast cancer and abortions.

House Bill 3077 by Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio): If a minor seeking an abortion is being raised by an adult other than her parents, that adult would be allowed to give parental consent. Currently, minors in that situation have to obtain permission from a judge. Houston lawyer Rita Lucido, who handles judicial bypass cases, says that 125,000 Texas teenagers live with an adult other than their parents. This bill would allow the adult who cares for the minor to be a part of this important decision, rather than requiring the minor to go through the judicial process.

House Bills 301 and 306 by Rep. Jessica Farrar (D-Houston): A woman seeking an abortion because of a fetal abnormality or a woman who is the victim of incest or sexual assault would not have to go through the required 24-hour waiting period or informed consent process to get an abortion. The process is “cruel and unnecessary” for women in these situations, Farrar said in the hearing.

Yesterday, I got a call from a concerned woman named Amy Sweet, who was getting calls from Texas legislators and the governor. Sweet, a practicing physicians assistant in gynecological oncology, testified back in February in favor of mandating the HPV vaccine for young girls. Perry and Rep. Jessica Farrar (D-Houston) who filed legislation similar to Perry’s mandate, wanted Sweet to testify again in front of the Senate today, since she was one of the most passionate and knowledgeable advocates of the vaccine.

Sweet was stressing out because she couldn’t possibly make it to the Capitol again to wait for testimony to begin — the last time she showed up, the House got into a budget tussle and the committee hearing on the vaccine started several hours late and ran until the wee hours of the morn’. Sweet’s leaving soon to go to Central America to conduct an HPV screening seminar for docs down there. She’s also been planning her wedding. All of which has made for a hectic couple of months. But what had her worried on the phone was that she was still carting around a stack of research she had collected showing HPV 16’s link to face and throat cancer. Oral and throat cancers account for 30,000 cases annually in the U.S., and about 7,000 deaths. HPV is linked to about 1/5 of cases.

This was all information that the House Committee on Public Health asked Sweet to gather for their consideration. The committee passed the bill to the House only days later without ever seeing Sweet’s data. She also said yesterday that she’s been searching in vain for research cited by an expert witness (brought in by Rep. Dennis Bonnen (R-Angleton) who led the charge to overturn Perry’s mandate) that cast doubt on the vaccine’s near-perfect efficacy rate and safety record.

“The vaccine is safe. It’s completely safe,” she said with exasperation.

I wish I’d told her not to sweat missing the testimony, since it has long been apparent that the Lege wanted nothing to do with requiring the vaccine. Sure enough, the Senate committee on Health and Human Services sent Bonnen’s bill to the full Senate. It’s becoming more evident that, despite all the statistics thrown around the debate, the move to kill Perry’s mandate had less to do with science and more to do with the right-wing ideology and the legislature’s anger at the governor’s heavy handedness. In the latest example, the Senate committee attached a provision that would require the Lege to revisit the vaccine mandate in 2011. Four more years of study on a vaccine that prevents a disease which can take decades to manifest is not going to yield some startling new information that suddenly makes the mandate decision crystal clear.

It’s a difficult issue, and in spite of all the evidence of the vaccine’s usefulness, it’s still understandable that parents would want a say in a decision that relates to their children and sexual behavior. But with Senate approval surely looming, the common-sense option of having the state pay for the vaccine, as Washington state is about to do and the Australian government already does, will go unproposed. Maybe we can at least hope one of the HPV education bills doesn’t get lost in the upcoming schedule crunch, especially given the woeful attitudes toward safe sex among college students in this article.

This week there’s a bit of synergy at the Lege with a lot of action on both stem cell research and the death penalty. Depending on one’s perspective, the week could go one of two ways. Either it’s a week of hope — righting the wrongs of our criminal justice system and seeking out new and exciting cures for some of humanity’s most vexing diseases. Or it’s a week of grim moral decay — getting weak on crime while destroying the unborn. Your interpretation may vary. And perhaps there is some shades of gray between those two poles.

The stem-cell events:

The House State Affairs committee will hold hearings on half a dozen stem cell bills Thursday at 8 a.m., room E2.010.

And for the death penalty:

An exoneration hearing today in Dallas will make James Curtis Giles the 13th person cleared in Dallas County based on DNA evidence, and the third this year under the new DA, Craig Watkins. Depending on the count he’s either the 199th or 200th exoneration in the country. As my Observer colleague Patrick Michels says, “Either way, it’s a lot.”

On Tuesday, Sen. Rodney Ellis’ Innocence Commission bill (SB 263) has its hearing in the Criminal Justice Committee, room E1.016, at 10 a.m. The hearing will also include his bills to increase compensation for wrongful imprisonment and to clean up procedures for suspect lineups.

Finally on Wednesday night, the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is hosting an event at UT featuring the Rev. Carroll Pickett, “a former prison chaplain who ministered to over a hundred men executed in Texas, and author of the book Within These Walls.” Details on their website.

And then of course, tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. in E1.036, the Senate Finance Committee will be dealing with that little exercise in priorities called the state budget, SB 1. In the past few sessions when money was tight, the budget was usually rammed down the throats of senators without much effective complaint. Now that there is a little extra money and even less love for the Lite Gov. David Dewhurst, there is the potential for interesting alliances and objections.

As always, the Observer blogging team will be searching for pearls among the oysters.

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?”

Evidently, what young pregnant women really need is a big hug, and the state should foot the $5 million bill to give it to them. “You ever think these girls might need a momma just to give them a little love? That’s what this program does,” said Dallas Republican Rep. Jim Jackson, referring to crisis pregnancy centers.

Last session, the state budget took $5 million previously used to fund family planning and earmarked it for crisis pregnancy centers, which provide “pregnancy support services that promote childbirth.” The centers are designed to steer women away from abortion, and do not provide the healthcare services that family planning clinics do, like pap smears, STI testing and contraception.

The $5 million was allocated to “alternatives to abortion” again this session. Reps. Elliott Naishtat (D-Austin) and Michael Villarreal (D-San Antonio) each proposed a budget amendment to redirect those funds elsewhere. Naishtat’s would have put the $5 million toward child abuse prevention grants, while Villarreal’s would have put the money toward family planning programs. Both amendments were voted down.

Villarreal said crisis pregnancy centers do not help prevent unintended pregnancies, which is the best way to reduce the number of abortions. Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) said the problem with crisis pregnancy centers is that they appear on the surface to be medically related, as opposed to “mommas and grandmommas sitting in a rocking chair.”

Surprising no one, the House overwhelmingly shot down Perry’s HPV vaccine mandate. If the Senate approves Rep. Dennis Bonnen’s bill overturning Perry’s executive order, it will come with the gratuitous rider that only the Legislature will have the authority to make the vaccination mandatory for school attendance. The House’s desire to pass this bill without a reasonable debate has been rivaled only by its drive to ignore Rep. Jessica Farrar’s bill, which was very similar to the governor’s executive order and filed well before that fateful decree came down.

Farrar held a press conference this morning to reiterate her support for a mandate. Once again, a cancer survivor Jacqueline Golson (pictured above), offered compelling testimony on behalf of the mandate. Like all of the survivors I’ve heard, Golson spoke eloquently, reasonably, and hopefully that the state would take a step toward alleviating suffering. And these women suffer, even if they survive.

In Golson’s case, she’s endured years of surgeries, biopsies, treatments, follow-up exams, and other invasive procedures. She said her treatments over the years would have cost $2.2 million if she hadn’t been lucky enough to have insurance. As both she and Farrar repeatedly pointed out: Prevention is, in almost every circumstance, preferrable to treatment. “Just having more pap tests is ridiculous,” Farrar said, referring to Bonnen’s proposed alternative to the vaccine. The vaccine is about “saving the lives and saving the quality of life” of young women, Farrar said.

Compare that rhetoric to the fear of the unknown that folks who oppose the mandate try to marshal (and then offset with homilies about increasing health coverage for women). It’s a sad contrast, and it was only exacerbated later by listening to a few seconds of Bonnen on the floor running roughshod over the entire concept of number sense. I didn’t have the stomach to endure a debate leading to an inevitable conclusion.

But here’s the Dallas Morning News’s summary: “Mr. Bonnen said that medical advancements and other developments between now and 2009, when the Legislature will meet, may make a mandatory vaccine sensible. But so far, he argued, it’s not worth the possible risks to the state’s 165,000 girls entering sixth grade a year from now.” I wish there were a way to say it more forcefully: This makes no sense. The very limited risks the vaccine presents now will still be present in two years; because HPV can take years to develop into cancer, it will possibly be decades before these small risks can be discounted completely. Claiming otherwise is simply dishonest grandstanding. Not that the House was ever known for such a thing.