AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — Clad in red robes and white bonnets, reproductive rights activists stood in the rotunda of the Texas Capitol building Tuesday shouting one word over and over: “Shame!”
They were dressed as characters from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which depicts a totalitarian theocracy where women are held as reproductive slaves, with no control over their own bodies.
They protesters were reacting to a flurry of restrictive anti-abortion legislation in the past few days.
On Saturday, the Texas House passed an omnibus anti-abortion bill that would require abortion providers to bury or cremate fetal tissue, bans the safest type of abortion women can undergo during the second trimester of a pregnancy, and prohibits donation of fetal tissue from abortion for medical research.
On Monday, the Senate revived a measure that would require women to buy separate insurance plans to cover elective abortions, attaching it as an amendment to a House bill on health data.
On Tuesday, the Senate revived another bill, which prohibits parents from seeking damages for “wrongful birth” medical malpractice claims if they were not informed of genetic or congenital abnormalities in the fetus. Opponents have said it would allow doctors to lie to their patients in an attempt to prevent abortions.
Abortion even made it into debate on an animal cruelty bill Tuesday, when Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, derailed a bill which would have enhanced the criminal penalties for torturing and killing pets in order to make a point about abortion regulations. He said he does not believe that the punishment for animal cruelty should be harsher than the punishment for doctors who perform late-term abortions.
“I cannot, will not and shall not allow the Texas House to place a higher value to a pet over the life of a human being,” Tinderholt said during the debate.
Tinderholt’s own anti-abortion bill, which would have charged any woman who had an abortion with murder, is one of the few anti-abortion bills proposed this session that did not receive so much as a committee hearing.
Tinderholt said his bill would force women to be more personally responsible for sex.
Legal experts were quick to dismiss Tinderholt’s proposal as unconstitutional, but many activists and Democratic lawmakers believe that most of the anti-abortion bills passed this session are unconstitutional as well, and likely to be struck down in the courts, as similar laws have been in the past.
The U.S. United States Supreme Court struck down Texas House Bill 2 last year, which required that abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, and required the clinics to meet the same minimum standards as ambulatory surgical centers.
In that case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court ruled that restrictions on abortion cannot unduly burden a woman without providing a legitimate medical benefit.
Apparently anticipating similar legal challenges to Senate Bill 8, the omnibus abortion bill that passed Saturday, the House sponsor, Rep. Cindy Burkett, R-Sunnyvale, proposed an amendment to make each provision in the bill severable, so that if one was found to be unconstitutional, the rest could remain unaffected.