Turns Out Texas Abortion Ban And Trans-Bashing Policies Are UNIMAGINABLY Cruel, Who Knew!

Oh, everybody? Right.

To the extent that there is a Republican platform aside from trolling liberals, it consists of unbridled cruelty under the guise of "protecting" the vulnerable. No place illustrates this better than Texas, which passed its draconian abortion ban this fall and, failing to pass a ban on gender affirming care for trans kids, has now criminalized it by executive fiat .

Two recent stories illustrate the real human cost of these laws for girls and women in Texas. The first, published yesterday in the Texas Tribune , describes the terror Governor Gregg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are inflicting on 13-year-old Adelyn Vigil, a transgender girl living in the Rio Grande Valley. Last month, Paxton declared that gender-affirming care is definitionally child abuse, and Abbott followed up by instructing all state agencies and mandatory reporters to initiate child abuse reports if they know of transgender children receiving treatment.

Adelyn, whose mother Adamalis drives her eight hours to access care in North Texas, has been suffering panic attacks because she fears that some busybody will sic Child Protective Services on her family and she'll wind up in foster care.

"Adelyn is terrified she will be forcibly separated from her mother," the Tribune reports. "So great is her anxiety that she doesn’t want to sleep in her own bed."

Last week five county district attorneys took to Twitter to promise not to prosecute parents for seeking medical care for transgender kids. "We want to assure our residents with transgender children that they are safe to continue seeking the care their children need," they wrote. But the reality is that the threat of investigation is terrifying in and of itself and, like the abortion bounty system, invites Texans to bring the wrath of the state onto each other.

Speaking of that vile abortion law, NPR had a truly heartbreaking interview this morning with Ana, a woman who spent her wedding night in the emergency room being told that her water had broken and there was no possibility that her 19-week-old fetus would survive. In any rational world, doctors would terminate the non-viable pregnancy to protect Ana's health and future fertility. But Texas in 2022 — where the legal time limit for an abortion is six weeks — is not a rational world, and hospitals wouldn't treat her unless and until she went into septic shock. So Ana's OB-GYN had to figure out how to get this poor woman to New Mexico or Colorado for an abortion. In the end, they decided it would be safer for her to risk going into labor on a plane than in a car in the middle of the West Texas desert.

"Oh, God, when I talk about this, this is the hardest thing. I had to come up with the game plan with my OB in case I went into labor on the flight," Ana told NPR reporter Sarah McCammon. "And I made sure that I bought us front row seats so I could be close to the bathroom in case it happened. And — like, no one should ever have to do that."

Please forgive me for being horribly blunt, but if Ana hadn't had thousands of dollars in savings to cross state lines to access medical care, she'd have had to sit there and wait for her baby to die inside her. That is what the framers of this law intended, and that is what will happen to poor women in Texas.

And that is today's Republican Party. Under the guise of protecting women and children, they are inflicting unimaginable cruelty aided and abetted by a stolen Supreme Court. But hey, family values, right?

[ Texas Tribune / NPR ]

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