by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
It's like a really bad episode of The Twilight Zone.
In its race to the bottom with Florida to become the nation's most dystopian state, Texas has just jumped into a commanding lead. This Thursday authorities in Starr County arrested a young woman and charged her with murder after what was reportedly a self-induced abortion. The woman spent two nights in jail before being released Saturday on a $500,000 bond. She now has legal counsel and is awaiting her day in court.
The arrest victim has been identified as 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera. Starr County is located in the Rio Grande Valley along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Texas legislature recently passed - and the state's GOP governor, Greg Abbott, signed - a draconian measure to stop nearly all abortions in the state by giving private citizens the right to sue anyone who provides an abortion (or aids or abets in an abortion) after a so-called "fetal heartbeat" can be detected (usually around the 6th week of pregnancy). The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies caused by incest or rape, and it even allows relatives and friends of the rapist fathers to sue as interested parties.
But, according to University of Texas Law Professor Stephen Vladeck, Texas law doesn't apply to the murder of an unborn child if the conduct charged has been committed by the mother of the unborn child. Apparently the authorities in Starr County disagree with the professor's interpretation of Texas law, and now the matter will go before a judge.
A recent study out of the University of Texas revealed that about 1,400 Texas women are traveling out-of-state each month to obtain abortions, and another study by the American Medical Association showed a sharp rise in the number of Texas women requesting abortion pills from the overseas non-profit provider, Aid Access.
It would appear as though the state of Texas, and with it the United States of America, is headed into dark and dangerous times as the War on Women kicks into high gear. This week's outrage in Texas will soon be copied in Florida, and then Oklahoma, and Alabama, and Mississippi, and Missouri, and on across every cultural backwater in America until women everywhere fear for their safety as they each grapple with how to meet their own unique medical needs.
Control of a woman's body should rest with the woman herself and her medical providers. Her health and well-being should not a topic of concern or action by non-medical personnel such as legislators, law enforcement officers, ministers, nosey neighbors, ex-partners or spouses, or rapists and their friends and family.
Everyone should have a basic control over their own body - and everyone should enjoy a basic right to privacy!
(On-line donations to help with the legal defense fees and economic relief of Lizelle Herrera may be made to the "Frontera Fund," an abortion fund serving the Rio Grande Valley.)
1 comment:
The facts remain fuzzy. It is not clear, to me at least, if this woman had a spontaneous abortion which is commonly called a miscarriage or if she took the abortifacient or did she go the wire clotheshanger route?
While none of that matters to me. She should not have been forced into a desperate situation. It does matter to the misguided radicalized Republican legislators, governor, and prosecutors who are pandering to a small but well organized bunch of religious zealots Hell bent on violating the Establishment Clause and turning American women into breeding stock.
Let us not forget that Roe v. Wade was a case about privacy. What the Hell happened to the privacy women used to have when it came to their bodies?
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