Texas is NOT a pro-life state
Also: ‘On The Brink’ worth watching; Excluding Trump from the ballot
Perhaps you are among the crowd that still adheres to the notion that Texas is a “pro-life” state, that is, that our state’s leaders have designed laws to provide for the full-term pregnancy and health of babies and young children.
I suppose every member of the club must be drinking that free bubble-up and eating that rainbow stew, as philosopher Merle Haggard predicted.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as most of the readers of this site know. It’s long been clear that the state’s legislature doesn’t give a good hoo-ha about the lives of children already born.
If that were true, the state would provide decent and on-going health insurance for indigent families with children. Doing so would save money but it might look bad to Republican voters as some sort of “giveaway”, which could endanger a few votes.
Texas legislators definitely want to protect precious votes, children, not so much.
Surely you would think that legislators are keen on protecting those still in the womb, given the restrictive laws passed to prevent a woman from getting an abortion.
As it turns out, though, our state’s leaders are falling short in that area, too, at least according to the March of Dimes Foundation, whose mission is to find a way to improve childbirth survival for both mother and child.
Not that protecting mothers has ever been a high priority for those on the rabid end of the anti-abortion movement.
Mothers are clearly secondary in the equation. The reason? It has nothing to do with medical advice and everything to do with conservative Christian religious concepts.
According to those who believe this way, if the mother dies during childbirth, that would be God’s will, just as it would be His will if the child dies just after birth. However, these folks feel as though an abortion to save the mother is somehow usurping God’s authority.
(Note: many of those who believe this way are fully willing to take on the authority in matters of capital punishment.)
The group’s latest “report card” produces a Maternal Vulnerability Index not just for the nation, or even simply each state, but for every county within each state. The lower the number is the lower the vulnerability is for women.
Only one county in our entire state — tiny Rockwall County, just east of Dallas — falls into the lowest vulnerability category with 17.5 score.
Here behind the Pine Curtain, the story isn’t so good. Smith County — a regional medical hub, as a score of 68.1, putting it in the second-highest risk category.
And Smith County is as good as it gets in East Texas.
Over in Gregg County, the score is 76.7. In Harrison County it is 86.6. Just north in Marion County the score is an even 99. Shelby County’s MVI is 99.8, giving it the distinction of being the most hazardous place in East Texas for a woman to give birth.
The scale only goes up to 100, so Shelby County is just about as bad as it can get.
The state cannot fix all of this, no amount of money will solve all these problems but just think what might be possible if state leaders put as much energy into working on the total health care aspect of the birthing process.
Might it possibly be that, if we emphasized that, both the number of abortions and the number of maternal deaths might decrease? We will probably never know.
We can be sure that trying to shoe-horn in religious beliefs into secular situations will cause nothing but distress for both believers (I’m in that group) and those who choose otherwise.
We can — and should — do much better.
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If you care about what women in Texas must go through when they are carrying a child who is dead or will die shortly after birth you will want to watch a television program, “On The Brink,” scheduled to air at 7 p.m. Friday on ABC.
Actually, even if you don’t care about the women and have your mind made up you should tune into this program, which is currently on the Hulu channel if you subscribe to that streaming channel.
None of the women in this hour-long documentary would have chosen abortion and each one of them has a terrible story to tell about how bad laws entrap people into situations that endanger their lives.
As far as I could tell, each of them was able to get the medical care they urgently needed by going out of state.
It’s well worth the hour of your time.
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If someone tries to tell you that the decisions by Maine and Colorado to remove former President Donald J. Trump from primary ballots in those states is without precedent, you can confidently tell them they are wrong.
For a fact, it has happened before in circumstances much more suspect than the current cases without a Constitutional leg to stand on.
It was in 1948 and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party was on the cusp of breaking away to the Republicans.
The fate was sealed when the Democrats, in the party’s 1948 convention in Philadelphia, soundly rejected a slew of platforms that would have had the party supporting segregation, the poll-tax, bans on interracial marriage and banning Black and whites working together on the job.
It was too much for Alabama, which crafted rules that required the state’s electors to never vote for Truman but instead vote for the States’ Rights candidate, Strom Thurmond.
Truman’s name didn’t appear on the ballot and there was no way to vote for him for those who lived in Alabama.
Thurmond carried only four states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — but all other Southern states went for Truman. While all the experts predicted that Republican Thomas E. Dewey of New York would win, Truman won easily.
Alabama voters were angry on two counts — first that the rest of the union wasn’t nearly as racist and second that Alabama officials did not allow them to vote for Democats.
Needless to say, the States’ Rights Party died a quick death — though segregation and the rest remained vital issues.
It has all happened before. Not saying it is right or wrong, just that it isn’t new.