Perhaps you’ve heard about what’s happening in the dystopian state of Texas, where Kate Cox, 20 weeks pregnant and a mother of two, is trying to get an abortion because her fetus has a terminal genetic disorder and because the fetus’ condition threatens Kate’s health and future fertility. But Texas’ attorney general – a puppet of the state’s theocratic zealots – has invaded her bodily privacy by blocking the abortion and threatening to prosecute any doctor who dares perform it.
This is a totally predictable post-Roe nightmare, a Handmaid’s Tale in real time. But before assessing it, I want to turn back the clock 18 years to the Terri Schiavo case. Bear with me for a few paragraphs, and you’ll see the connection to Cox.
Back then, in Florida, 26-year-old Schiavo was permanently comatose with irreversible brain damage. She’d been that way for more than eight years. Her husband finally decided to remove her feeding tube and let nature take its course. A Florida judge, after hearing doctors’ testimony, told Terri’s husband to go ahead…but that’s when congressional Republicans stepped in. They invaded the husband’s privacy by ginning up a bill that required him to keep the tube in. House GOP leader Tom DeLay infamously declared: “I don’t care what the husband says.”
A federal judge ultimately ruled that the congressional GOP had no business getting involved, and Terri was allowed to die. I wrote about her case at the time in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I charted the gap between what the party purported to believe in (small non-intrusive government) and what it was actually doing (using government to invade a family’s privacy). I also quoted Ronald Reagan, who’d said: “The basis of conservatism is a desire for less governmental interference.”
Alas, by 2005, theocratic zealots were well on their way to hijacking conservatism for their moral crusade. And what we’re seeing now, in Texas, is evidence of how that crusade has mutated.
The erasure of Roe v. Wade, as authored by theocrat Sam Alito, has triggered an open season on women – especially in the most oppressive red states, where “pro-life” zealots now have license to run wild. As so vividly evidenced in the Kate Cox case, government can be weaponized to interfere with women’s most intimate personal decisions.
In a recent interview, Kate said: “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer a heart attack or suffocation (if the baby is born at all; most are not). I desperately want the chance to try for another baby and want to access the medical care now that gives me the best chance at another baby.” Since 95 percent of such pregnancies don’t even go to term or are stillborn, it’s understandable that she wants to protect her health and fertility.
But alas, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton doesn’t think it’s understandable. This right-wing white dude has more power over Kate’s health than Kate does.
Last week, Paxton was displeased that a Texas lower court had granted permission for an abortion – the judge had ruled that “the longer Ms. Cox stays pregnant, the greater the risks to her life” – so Paxton stepped in to terrorize the family. He got the state’s highest court, comprised of nine Republican appointees, to block the abortion and examine the issue at length. Kate’s health is further imperiled by this limbo, but Paxton doesn’t care. He even sent a letter to three hospitals, warning them not to help Kate and thus risk criminal liability: “We feel it is important for you to understand the potential long-term implications if you permit such an abortion to occur at your facility.”
This is what happens when zealots get weaponized in post-Roe America. Texas’ blanket abortion ban actually does permit exceptions in cases that pose “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” but apparently Paxton doesn’t think that Kate’s fertility is a major bodily function.
Some avowed foes of abortion say they’re sickened by the Texas case. Heath Mayo, a conservative Christian attorney and activist, tweets: “I am pro-life. And the Kate Cox medical complication in Texas -where the child is unlikely to survive & the mother’s health & fertility are at risk – is precisely the type of exception (that) life-centered law & conscience should permit. Forcing Kate to term sets back the cause of life.”
We don’t yet know whether Kate will be freed from the zealots’ diktat. (Update: She’s now planning to leave the state and get an abortion elsewhere.) But what we can say, with a fair degree of certitude, is that cases like this threaten to set back the Republican electoral cause in 2024. If the Biden-Harris campaign has even a spark of life, they can tee up the abortion issue and connect the dots – from Trump’s makeover of the U.S. Supreme Court to the invasion of women’s privacy at the local level.
Even MAGA nutjob J. D. Vance, an Ohio senator, admits that the GOP is vulnerable on abortion. Yesterday, on CNN, he claimed ignorance about the Texas case (“I don’t know the details of that story”), but he did say this: “We have to recognize how much voters mistrust us on this issue…If people see Republicans as the party that’s…just trying to take people’s rights away, then we’re going to lose.”
So how hard can it possibly be for Biden and the Democrats to take full advantage?
Don’t answer that.