Members of the Texas House were scheduled last month to hear testimony on House Bill 2197, which would have established equal protection of the laws for preborn babies and finally abolished abortion in the state.
In the weeks since the bill was nixed from the hearing schedule by Texas House Rep. John Smithee, the chair of the committee where the bill was to be heard, Pro-Life establishment leaders have rushed to justify their opposition to the bill.
Many of their critiques were rooted in the assertion that House Bill 2197 would have targeted women for prosecution for murdering preborn babies, or that House Bill 2197 was simply not politically prudent.
One such critique of House Bill 2197 and the abolitionists who fought for this legislation came from Kyleen Wright, the president of the Texans for Life Coalition, who wrote an article earlier this month decrying the legitimacy of abolition efforts.
Her arguments rely on hypotheticals about political expediency. She asserts that currently enacted Pro-Life laws in Texas are saving thousands of babies, while ignoring the fact that conservative estimates indicate more Texas babies are aborted now than before current Pro-Life regulations went into effect.
Wright presents such regulations as successful while failing to acknowledge that countless thousands of preborn babies are legally murdered under the express cover of those laws.
‘Mere Girls Who Know Little’
Wright begins with an accurate description of a major divide between the Pro-Life and abolition movements by noting that Pro-Life activists “oppose the criminalization of women who have abortions” while those who favor abolition “insist that we will only end abortion when we hold the mother accountable by charging her with a crime.”
These statements are entirely correct. While abolitionists do not single out the mother in our efforts, we do believe that murdering anyone should be illegal for everyone, including pregnant women, and we indeed affirm that abortion will not be truly abolished until that happens.
Texas is a perfect example of this reality: even under Pro-Life laws which ban abortion for everyone except the mother of the baby, there are still over 25,000 babies murdered on Texas soil every single year. That is largely because self-induced abortion, which is legal for women in deep-red Texas, has been on the rise. None of this even accounts for the thousands of Texas babies murdered by Texas residents who travel to other nearby states to commit prenatal homicide.
Innumerable women in Texas are knowingly, and without coercion, obtaining and taking abortion pills to murder their own preborn children. They can do this legally because Texas law offers blanket immunity to women for such conduct and provides a clear loophole for that behavior.
Rather than dealing with those realities, Wright enters into an extensive contrived argument about the possible effects of criminalizing prenatal homicide for all parties willfully involved, including the woman who self-induces an abortion.
She claims that “criminalizing women protects the abortionist at the expense of the mother” because testimony from a woman against an abortionist “is less credible if she gives it to avoid her own prosecution.”
Wright speculates that women would be “less likely to seek help from a pregnancy help center” because child sacrifice activists may “quickly spread the word that any information collected at the pregnancy center can be subpoenaed by the state and used to prosecute her.” She fails to mention the verifiable reality that those same activists have already spread information on how to obtain mail-order abortion pills in all fifty states, advice which thousands are now following.
The foundation for her arguments becomes clear when Wright suggests that “many of these mothers” who willfully seek abortions “are mere girls who know little about their own bodies, much less the body within theirs.”
Pro-Life leaders often make such arguments, asserting that women are categorical victims of abortion rather than moral agents with the capacity to discern right from wrong, or that they are otherwise too dull to understand they are carrying a valuable human life made in the image of God.
Such claims are easily disproven. They have been so thoroughly debunked in the age of women shouting their abortions that mere ideological inertia is the only explanation for why some Pro-Life leaders still insist upon them.
Wright herself acknowledges that supporting criminal penalties for women who willfully commit prenatal homicide “is quite the departure from the movement” that has relied for decades on the argument that women are second victims of abortion.
Amid her contrived hypotheticals and her commitment to Pro-Life establishment dogma, the irony is that Wright fails to see how abolishing abortion does indeed benefit women tempted toward murdering their preborn children.
Beyond the central purpose of protecting preborn babies from murder and providing for justice on their behalf, equal protection would deter women from becoming murderers in the first place. The point of abolition bills is not to penalize women. The first function of a statute like House Bill 2197 would be to proactively deter women and all other parties considering abortion from committing prenatal homicide.
Wright and her second victim narrative nevertheless leave no room for such basic principles. She instead lauds measures that allow babies to be murdered under cover of law and permit women to burden themselves with the guilt and shame of having committed murder.
‘The Art of the Possible’
In the latter half of her article, Wright leans upon the argument that “personhood supporters” such as abolitionists are somehow responsible for the recent leftward shift of Colorado, a reality she juxtaposes with the apparently resounding Pro-Life victories achieved in Texas.
Wright asserts that the failures of three Colorado personhood ballot amendments more than a decade ago produced an “end result” in which “Colorado has become a top abortion haven.”
Ignoring other possible factors such as the targeted efforts from leftist financiers working to transform Colorado into a leftist hellscape, she would have readers believe that sincere efforts from anti-abortion advocates seeking to recognize the humanity of their preborn neighbors was the cause of the shift.
Wright chides abolitionists to remember that “politics is the art of the possible,” staring into her crystal ball and declaring that they will not “help the movement or save more babies by promoting policies wildly out of step with the opinions or convictions of most Americans.”
In other words, she seemingly believes that efforts to abolish abortion, even in deep-red states like Texas, are automatically doomed for failure. We are apparently expected to believe this claim on the word of an activist who has never actually tried to abolish abortion in Texas, but who has only supported a stream of abortion regulations that have kept abortion legal in the state for several decades.
Wright celebrates that such regulationism has “rolled back abortion laws and closed abortion clinics.” But she continues to omit the truth that abortion persists under those conditions, even at record levels, under the permission of the very Pro-Life regulations she has championed.
Wright triumphantly declares “they have Colorado, we have Texas,” even as the blood of 25,000 preborn babies is shed every single year in our state under cover of law, and under the watchful eye of a Pro-Life establishment which has enabled rather than ended rampant child sacrifice.
House Bill 2197 would have directly addressed the reality of self-induced abortion, but the same Pro-Life leaders who oversaw decades of legalized abortion in Texas also subverted that effort. This was not the first time they have opposed the abolition of abortion in Texas, and should they continue to have any modicum of power, they will almost certainly oppose abolition again.
Christians who desire equal protection of the laws for their preborn neighbors should be aware of these realities. We must continue to advance the abolition of abortion, even if Pro-Life leaders stand in our way with tired arguments and contrived reasons to keep abortion legal.