Texas Republicans Share Perfectly Normal Fantasies About Killing Women Who Have Abortions, IVF
Believe people when they tell you whom they'd like to kill.
This past January, a group of Republican Party officals in Hood County, Texas, met with a group called Abolish Abortion Texas to discuss how they would like to put women to death — including minors, including victims of rape and incest — for having abortions or IVF, along with the doctors who perform them.
Oh! And they did it at an official meeting of a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated extremist group, True Texas Project, with ties to white supremacist Nick Fuentes and a habit of retweeting other white supremacists, like Identity Evropa founder and neo-Nazi Patrick Casey.
Video of the event was recently obtained by Hood County Democrats Chair Adrienne Quinn Martin after it was originally streamed on the Facebook account of host Monica Brown. Brown is a prolific book banner who also disowned her own son for being gay.
So, just a really nice crowd of people for Hood County Constable Scott London, Hood County GOP Chair Steve Biggers, and Hood County GOP Chair candidate Greg Harrell to be hanging around with.
Via Texas Democrats:
Paul Brown, who is the Director of Policy for Abolish Abortion Texas (AATX) said that IVF is a form of abortion and that when a fertilized egg is destroyed it should be considered murder, saying “Their lives [women] don’t matter any more than the babies’ they are killing.”
Brown also said how the group is against basic contraception pointing to the emergency contraception pill Plan B, saying that it “terminates or kills a baby prior to implantation – which is an abortion”
Brown went on to say that they will “never be okay with abortions in the instance of incest or rape” with several audience members suggesting that pregnant woman and doctors who perform abortions should be “held accountable” to the highest extent of the law.
It’s not clear if they want to put women to death for going on the pill or getting an IUD (many of which also work by preventing implantation), but I think we can fairly assume that it is a possibility. They just love life so, so much!
These are not just a bunch of internet trolls or random sociopaths with no power — both of these groups are hugely influential in Texas politics and have met with people a whole lot higher up than some random county GOP officials. People like Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz.
As Politico reported yesterday, as much as Republicans may be scrambling to look less extreme on abortion, as much as they have been trying to claim that they have no intention of going after IVF, this is the end goal of many anti-abortion groups and that is who they are beholden to.
They plan to appeal to evangelical denominations and their leaders to take a firm stance that IVF as practiced in the U.S. destroys human life. That, they hope, will reshape how conservative Christians — and in turn, the officials they elect — view the issue, just as it did on abortion. Ultimately, it could lead to laws that create a patchwork of IVF access in the United States, where the procedure is more accessible in liberal states and more limited in conservative ones.
This is how it begins. One moment they’d never take it away, the next they’re plotting out how to put people to death for it. The more they bring it up, the more they hint at it, the more their people get used to the idea.
When people tell you who they are, believe them. When they tell you who they want to kill, believe them and then run for your life.
PREVIOUSLY:
These people scare me.....
Let me be crystal fucking clear: I am in the middle of my last struggles with infertility. I can't afford IVF, but I personally would struggle with leaving embryos to get thrown out- and I am someone who would be excited to foster/adopt anyway, which also plays a role in my feelings about IVF. But my feelings about IVF are 1) PERSONAL and 2) IRRATIONAL. I would never use those to make public policy because my god how fucking stupid would that be?? That would be like saying I hate Peeps, BAN EM. And then people couldn't nuke em in the microwave or toast them over the fire or use a magnifying glass to melt their beady little eyes or whatever brings them joy. Why in the name of God would I stop others from experiencing joy just because I'm not into something??
I don't think embryos are people; I don't think they can feel pain; I think I'd just get kinda verklempt over the loss of those potentials and so for me, if I ever did have IVF, I'd probably prefer to be able to have a little goodbye. For others, maybe they'd like to be able to donate their embryos. (I have severe chronic genetic depression, which is highly hereditary, and I wouldn't want my spawn to have to grow up without parents who understood that & had put in the hard yards to eliminate the environmental factors.)
These anti-abortion people do not and never have valued life. Hell, they don't even value reducing abortion, given their irrational hate-on for birth control (and sex ed, two shit tastes that taste shit together!) Abortion go down when out of wedlock birth is destigmatised, when poverty goes down, when family violence goes down, when women have more stability and financial independence, when both men and women have solid, comprehensive sex ed throughout their education and access to a variety of birth control methods so they can find what works for them. The studies have shown these over and over and over again. If they want us back in the 50s, they will have not only the abortion rate of the 50s, but the death and disability rate for both mothers and babies.