Texas Lawmakers Consider Bill That Would Make Abortion a Homicide and Punishable by Death Penalty

Zachary Stieber
By Zachary Stieber
April 10, 2019US News
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Texas Lawmakers Consider Bill That Would Make Abortion a Homicide and Punishable by Death Penalty
A 3D ultrasound showing a baby inside the womb. (Fotopress/Getty Images)

Texas lawmakers debated a bill on April 9 well into the morning that would not only ban abortion, but would classify the act of terminating an unborn baby a homicide.

House Bill 896 would open up the possibility of punishing women who get abortions with the death penalty by designating abortion a criminal homicide.

If the bill becomes law, women who got an abortion would be sentenced to life in prison or even death.

“A living human child, from the moment of fertilization on fusion of a human spermatozoon with a human ovum is entitled to the same rights, powers, and privileges as are secured or granted by the laws of this state to any other human child,” it stated.

Lawmakers said the bill would only align the legal consequences for killing a human being that are already enforced in other areas.

“I think it’s important to remember that if a drunk driver kills a pregnant woman, they get charged twice. If you murder a pregnant woman, you get charged twice. So I’m not specifically criminalizing women. What I’m doing is equalizing the law,” State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, a Republican, said during the debate, reported Fox 9.

While pro-life groups filled the Texas Capitol as lawmakers debated the bill, some questioned punishing the women getting abortions.

Texans for Life president, Kyleen Wright, for instance, told the Christian website Faith Wire that her group “opposes criminalizing or penalizing women as it only protects the abortionist.”

Not everyone felt the same.

“We’re here today to bring a bill to the committee about abolishing abortion in Texas and criminalizing abortion because abortion is murder, whether you are an unborn child or whether you are born,” Delaney Head, member of Abolish Abortion Texas, told the Daily Texan, a student newspaper at the University of Texas-Austin. “Every human being has a right to life. We want equal justice for the murder of unborn children as for those who are born.”

Others focused on the abortion ban outlined in the proposal.

“Hundreds of abolitionists are here at the Capitol in Austin Texas for the first hearing of a bill, ever, that would abolish abortion in a state in our nation,” Mark Dickson, director of Right to Life East Texas, told Faith Wire.

Still others gathered to protest the bill, including Tatum Zeko, an English senior at the University of Texas-Austin.

She said that abortions should be legal, especially for women who have been raped or have medical conditions.

“I don’t believe ‘abortion’ is a dirty word,” Zeko told the Daily Texan. “I think society and religion have told us to believe that it’s a dirty word, when in all honesty, the people that I’ve known that have gotten an abortion are doing it because they need it and because it’s going to better their lives.”

A poll from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune earlier this year showed that 66 percent of Republican respondents said the state’s abortion laws should be stricter, versus 31 percent of Independents and 15 percent of Democrats. Some 42 percent of Texas respondents told Quinnipiac University in 2018 that abortion should be legal in most cases, versus 27 percent who said it should be legal in all cases and 27 percent who said it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Approximately 50 percent of Texas respondents told the Pew Research Forum in 2014 that abortion should be illegal in all of more cases.

The debate took place in the Texas House Judiciary Committee and finally wrapped up at 3 a.m. on Tuesday.

The bill will now advance to the full Texas House for debate.

NTD Photo
In an illustration photo, a doctor performs an ultrasound on a pregnant woman during her visit to a gynecologist. (Jennifer Jacobs/AFP/Getty Images)

Another Bill

The bill came as the Texas Senate passed another piece of legislation, SB 23, that would impose penalties on doctors and other healthcare practitioners who don’t treat infants who survive abortions.

“A physician who performed or attempted the abortion must exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to perserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious physician would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age,” the bill stated.

The bill would impose a fine and up to 10 years of prison on practitioners that fail to do so.

A similar bill failed in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The debate over taking care of children who are already born erupted after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam suggested earlier this year that in some cases, babies would be born but the doctor and the mother would decide to let the baby die.

“If it’s one life, one life out of a million, it’s worth saving,” said Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican who authored the bill, reported the Austin American-Statesman.

The bill requires doctors who perform abortions to “render aid, to do all they can to save that child,” she said.

Amanda Beatriz Williams of the Lilith Fund, which helps women who need financial assistance to pay for an abortion, told CBS Austin that the bill is a way “to make abortion inaccessible for people who need it, and to shame providers.”

Nicole Hudgens of the pro-life group Texas Values said that the bill “is ensuring children who survive an abortion is getting the same type of care that any other child would.”

“We want to make sure when a child is born alive, they get the protection they deserve,” Hudgens added.

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