Texas aborts reason in anti-abortion measure

The controversial abortion sonogram bill has passed the Senate by a vote of 21-10. Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, got the two-thirds vote needed to bring it to the floor, effectively ensuring it would pass.

Senators spent Wednesday in tense negotiations. The bill hinged on the two-thirds vote to suspend the rules and bring it up, because lawmakers aren't simply split along party lines: A couple of anti-abortion Democrats support it, and one Republican opposes it on civil liberties grounds. The vote in the Senate was key to this legislation, because the overwhelming Republican majority in the House makes it likely to breeze through that chamber.


For more click here

The right-wing is no longer concerned with making a solid logical argument against abortion or convincing anyone that a fetus is a person and the latest measure they're taking in Texas testifies to that. This legislation, which has now passed both the Texas House and Senate will require women seeking an abortion to view a sonogram of the fetus prior to the procedure. Be sure to acknowledge the careful language used when they say 'require.' Notice they don't use the term 'force.' However, that's exactly what's going on here. Women seeking an abortion in Texas, should this bill be made law, will be forced to view the fetus in a thinly-veiled attempt to guilt women out of going through with an abortion.

Oklahoma tried to pull this same stunt a little less than a year ago, but the governor there vetoed the bill. I can't imagine Texas Gov. Rick Perry will do the same.

The goal here is multi-layered. On the surface, it serves to humiliate and shame anyone seeking an abortion, leaving them psychologically scarred in an already very emotional hour. But it's deeper than that. This sort of legislation against reproductive rights aims to shift the conversation away from the tricky territory of individual rights, a phrase conservatives love to use, but rarely live up to.

When this story was mentioned on Good Reason News' tumblr, a liberal reader fell directly into this trap. That reader says, with an obviously sarcastic tone:

Let’s all guilt females into overpopulating the state with unwanted children that will cause crime rates to rise within 20 years.

Suddenly the discussion is where conservatives want it to be, this is the trick. This is when they've got you where they want you. Presumed consequences is a load of nonsense that allows conservatives to control the conversation.

Focus on this: Does the pregnant person deserve the right to a medical procedure or not? Everything else is a distraction, a detour designed to lead you down a path that dodges the real issue. Are we or are we not the owners of our own bodies? Is it the government's job to determine what medical procedures are necessary or not. All this talk about 'cases of rape' or 'using abortion as birth control' is just more decoys too, it's how they fool us into talking about how to best limit someone's right to an abortion.

People are autonomous creatures who deserve the right to make their own decisions in this matter, without being judged or supplying anyone with justification. I don't need to make the case to someone to get laser eye surgery and I don't need permission to get a face lift. If I break my knee, I don't need to defend my desire for treatment and nor should anyone owe anyone else an explanation on why they need an abortion.

It is, however, in the public's best interest to provide people seeking an abortion with a clean, safe, and affordable environment, not because of how the unwanted births might turn out, but because of simple economics. If we as a society either ban or make it economically unreasonable to obtain abortions we effectively open up a black-market that is guaranteed to result in horrors like the one seen in the Philadelphia office of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell's clinic, by the way, was not a Planned Parenthood center. It was a privately run facility.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of discussing what is, essentially, a non-sequitur. It's especially easy to make this mistake when the opposition refuses to address the actual issue at hand. When discussing abortion rights, the only rational approach is to focus on the 'rights' and not on the 'abortion.' Anything else and we're appealing to pathos, how we feel, and abandoning reason.