Texas Republicans want to punish abortion like baby-killing. Prison for women, or death | Opinion

Does Texas’ 2021 abortion law need to be “straightened out”?

Then why would Donald Trump say that about Arizona’s law?

Texas’ staunchly anti-abortion Republicans were unsettled the other day, when their presidential candidate said that Arizona went too far banning most abortions.

Texas’ law is like Arizona’s.

But here, Republicans aren’t debating exceptions for rape or incest.

They’re debating whether to jail women and abortion doctors, and whether to impose the death penalty.

You think I’m kidding?

Read it for yourself. It’s in the Texas GOP platform.

In 2022, delegates at the state party convention made it a Republican priority to enforce “equal protection” for the unborn from “the moment of fertilization.”

In other words, abortion — or using the Plan B pill, or trashing embryos — could be prosecuted as child killing.

In Texas, a woman or doctor could face a charge of capital murder, murder or manslaughter.

For years, the party position has been that abortion is homicide.

But now the party essentially calls for felony punishment. Defendants could always argue duress.

It’s item No. 36 in the Republican platform. Read it on the state party website at texasgop.org/platform.

Activists from Liberty Hill-based Abolish Abortion Texas pushed successfully for Republicans to make punishment a priority. That group considers other anti-abortion groups weak.

So you can imagine how leaders reacted to Trump’s comment calling for “common sense .... TO WIN ELECTIONS.”

“The truth is that Arizona has not gone far enough,” wrote Bradley W. Pierce, a lawyer and leader of Abolish Abortion Texas.

In a frightening recent speech to a Hood County meeting of the Grapevine-based True Texas Project, group spokesman Paul Brown of Richardson said “God’s law” calls for killing those involved in abortion, Plan B or destroying embryos — “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life.”

The county Republican chairman and some candidates were at the meeting. It was videoed and published by the Hood County Democratic Party.

Jon Speed, the pastor at By the Word Baptist Church in Briar, is a former Sundance Square street preacher who campaigns and protests for Abolish Abortion candidates.

He wrote bluntly on X.com: “Pro-lifers, your decades of compromise have come home to roost. And his name is Donald J. Trump.”

Speed is pushing for Republicans to adopt a platform plank to specifically outlaw discarding IVF embryos. The proposal will be submitted at the state party convention May 23-25 in San Antonio.

Speed also wrote that he would campaign door-to-door this weekend for North Richland Hills Republican David Lowe, an Abolish Abortion candidate for the Texas House.

Lowe is challenging incumbent state Rep. Stephanie Klick in the May 28 runoff.

For the first time, Abolish Abortion candidates are campaigning with money from two West Texas energy blllionaires, Christian school founder Tim Dunn of Midland and Eastland County preacher Farris Wilks.

More established pro-life leaders, such as Kyleen Wright of Arlington-based Texans for Life, are sticking with the position that abortion is wrong but that the way to promote the cause is to win hearts and votes, not to punish women.

Based on recent elections in other states that protected abortion rights, “it is evident the pro-life movement has more work to do,” she wrote in a message.

Texans for Life supports the “incremental approach” that led to Texas’ abortion ban, she wrote.

Wright described Trump’s position as “inarticulate” but added: “We understand his desire to not get ahead of the will of the voters.”

Texas Republicans may not understand the concept of “going too far.”

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