The OBGYN Justices
By James Moore
Anyone who has practiced or studied the dark art of politics, eventually arrives at the conclusion that nothing ever happens by accident in that practice. All occurrences are the product of planning, which might succeed with a positive outcome, or fail with unintended consequences. None of that, however, can be considered the result of dynamics that by happenstance resulted in a causation. A human mind set the pieces in motion, regardless of the nature of the final impact.
The findings of the Texas Supreme Court, regarding the pleadings of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and related to the pregnancy of Kate Cox, therefore, were never in doubt. The most stringent anti-abortion law in all the land had to be protected and that meant even if a woman’s life, every now and again, might need to be sacrificed. That degree of determinism was almost explicit in the text of the absurdly restrictive Texas trigger law. Consequently, neither the high court nor the AG even tried to express the slightest whiff of sympathy for the mother of two who was carrying a fetus with a fatal condition labelled trisomy 18, known for destroying internal organs. Her child was going to be miscarried, stillborn, or die shortly after birth, but by god, this is Texas, and it was fated to be born.
Cox’ case hinged on a clause in the state’s abortion law that allows for a medical exception when the woman’s health, or even her life, is at risk. The language in the statute requires doctors to exercise “reasonable medical judgment” prior to performing an abortion procedure. The standard is sufficiently vague that physicians tend to refuse providing abortions because there is a risk their prognoses might be challenged and found to be incorrect. Hesitancy is understandable when the doctor might be prosecuted for various types of felonies, face $100,000 fines, lose their licenses to practice medicine, and upon conviction by a local prosecutor, get up to 99 years in prison because overzealous Republican lawyers clearly know more about biology and childbirth than doctors. In fact, Texas Supreme Court justices have just made themselves the de facto OBGYNs of every woman in the state. The judges can begin to diagnose cases from the bench.
Allowing for medical exceptions in the new abortion regulations was a political ploy to get concerned opponents to give the regulation some benefit of a doubt. There does not appear, however, there was ever any intention, at least in the Texas version of the law, to provide women with abortions unless they were close to death. Kate Cox knew her attorneys were going to lose her case before the Texas Supreme Court and she had already left the state to seek an abortion in a location where such medical care is legal, and the electorate more sane. She is, at least in the case of her ability to travel, more fortunate than many other Texas women with problem pregnancies. Prior to the change in abortion laws in this state, about 50,000 were performed annually. The first year after the new regulations took effect, the number fell to 34, and in the first six months of 2023, only 17 exceptions had been granted.
It is pretty easy to extrapolate what those numbers mean. There were close to 50,000 women in Texas last year, (minus the 34), dealing with problem pregnancies, who either carried to term or went out of state for their health care services. Most of those women, though, likely now have a baby they did not want and often cannot afford, or a lifelong connection to a man whose presence can make their lives miserable. Tens of thousands of women find themselves trying to figure out child care when they can barely pay the rent and a high number of women exists who have been physically and emotionally traumatized by laws that made their situations go from bad to permanently awful. Their choices have diminished for what they might do with their own lives.
People against abortion in Texas and the rest of the country refer to themselves as “pro-life,” but they are really just “pro-birth.” They call abortion clinics and providers “baby killers,” but it now ought to be clear to everyone that conservative pro-lifers have become “mother killers.” Women will die because laws exist that criminalize finding a way to deal with their condition. The “pro-birthers” cannot be said to have concern for the child, especially in Texas. A child born in this state as a consequence of an unwanted pregnancy is in trouble if the mother is economically disadvantaged. There are almost no programs to help that child get health care, food, clothing, or a higher education, and if they are born with disabilities, the state government will put them on a waiting list for services, which will not deliver help for decades because there are tens of thousands already in that line due to a severe lack of funding and government concern. A child in the womb, even a zygote, is important to Republicans. A child breathing in the real world is of no great concern.
Unsurprisingly, the nine justices on the Texas Supreme Court, who unanimously ruled Ms. Cox was not eligible for an abortion procedure, are all conservative Republicans. There has not been a Texas Democrat cloaked in one of those robes since 1994, in part, because the justices are elected on statewide ballots rather than in their judicial districts, which means the political party that campaigns the most effectively wins the court. Voters, who might know a bit about a judge in their home district, tend to be even less informed about them than they do local candidates. Votes generally are cast party aligned, which might explain the election of John Devine in 2012.
Devine’s attitude regarding a woman’s right to choose is unsubtle. When he ran for election to the high court, Devine campaigned with a video on his website that talked about his wife carrying her doomed baby to full term. According to the narrative, it was their seventh child and the fetal condition risked killing the mother and the baby at delivery. Devine, though, praised his wife for “fearlessly” delivering the child, who the couple named Elizabeth. The baby died an hour after birth.
Devine, who got attention for a legal fight to keep the Ten Commandments on the wall of his Houston courtroom, revealed in his statewide campaign that he had been arrested 37 times for protesting at abortion clinics. The number was never verified by his campaign or journalists but his public sentiments during a 2012 Freedom of Religion rally in Fort Worth made it clear he cared more about religion and conservative ideology than he did the lives of women. Nobody has bothered to point out that it’s not exactly a good look for a candidate seeking a job on the most august legal body in the state to brag about breaking the law 37 times. Apparently, it’s different if you violate laws while being a conservative Christian.
A Future Justice Brags About Breaking the Law 37 Times
What sort of hope does a woman have when her pleading for an abortion that might save her life goes before a legal process that has already stated its opposition to the medical procedure? A potential justice who brags, probably untruthfully about being arrested 37 times for protesting at abortion clinics, can be expected to twist and strain the law with interpretations to serve his political and religious beliefs. Of course, Devine demands that Kate Cox and her doctors obey the statute because it is one he likes but when there were legal abortion rights under the U.S. Constitution that he did not care for, he was fine with breaking the law.
The national attention being granted the Cox story is certain to have political impact. Hypocrisies on the right are piling up so high they will be impossible to bury with political advertising. Republicans marching on their mantra that there needs to be less government are busy banning books and rewriting texts for public schools and forcing their Christian religion into public institutions are unable to see their own contradictions. Texas has a state government that keeps businesses from mandating that employees get Covid vaccines while also enforcing laws that prevent a mother from getting an abortion even as her doomed child threatens that mother’s life. Logic has abandoned Texas law.
And you ask me what I like about Texas?
This article was originally published in Texas to the World.
James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).
His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.
Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”
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12 comments
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Roswell
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Andrew Smith
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New England Cocky
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Pete Petrass
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Clakka
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Roswell
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Canguro
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Roswell
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Clakka
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frances
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Canguro
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wam
Return to home pageWhat a medieval state.
Interesting and masks base political calculations by the GOP dominated by fossil fueled Koch related influencers for their CNP/Trump base on ‘pro-life’; nevers an issue for WASP evangelicals till weaponised by the Moral Majority being used as battering ram.
Another dirty little secret, and related to Australian LNP, Koch linked IPA/CIS and Murdoch led RW media cartel, i.e. the (Rockefeller) ZPG Tanton Network nativism, they leverage to dog whistle asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants, population growth and border walls, inc. Australia’s virtual wall, the ‘nebulous’ NOM net OS migration.
How can Catholic boys who are allegedly ‘pro-life’ according to their ‘family values’ e.g. Abbott, Sheridan, Joyce et al. allow themselves to be informed and dog whistle using agitprop of dec. white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton; pro-abortion, sterilisation, euthanasia, refugee/immigration restrictions, eugenics, anti-semitism and anti-Catholic? Self hatred or whatever it takes to climb greasy poles?
@ Andrew Smith: Thank you for the deep background to Australian politics. I have been glancing it too regularly in my wider reading, and you bring it together as an ”American plot” by ill-educated, unthinking, too rich FRWNJs.
Surely any nation that has the USA (United States of Apartheid) as an ally and supplier of Military armaments has no need for any other enemies.
Texas is but one of 50 States. If you do not like the laws in Texas there are 49 other States to choose from. Just move, I know I sure as hell would.
Uncle Sam was always a hotbed of angry dissent and corruption. They seemed to ballistically scramble their way out of the dark ages, and after they had blown each other asunder in the civil war, for a short while they managed to institute a fairly robust framework of laws – albeit without essential functional separation of powers. But it didn’t last long, and as the 20th century moved into the 21st century, the rise of the evangelical absolutists headed for the Bill of Rights, especially the freedom of speech provision to create an ideological word-salad designed to defeat or strangulate almost any statute – and the lawyers greased themselves up.
As it developed a rhetoric to embed itself as self-appointed world-cop, rather than advance its industry and technology towards an environmentally focused peaceful future, it harvested paranoia and further immersed the world into the mechanics of industrialized murder and destruction.
A perfect platform for the festering of xenophobia and anti-science, and the intrusion of the fossil-fuel loving and pro-life lunacy.
The threatening and brainwashing of the entire American society has created a toxic exceptionalism, and a blind glorification of what can only be described as a death cult – a prophecy fulfilled, a self-inflicted armageddon.
Hopefully, the women and children will bring it back to earth. Who knows?
The politics of the Oz culture has better checks and balances, but for the imported erosions adopted by Dutton’s LNP, and the competitive evils peddled by mainstream media benchmarking itself to Murdocracy. After slothful disinterest, this could well be the era of our comeuppance.
Pete, I disagree.
In my opinion you stay and fight.
Pete Petrass, whilst you appear to believe that you’d have the freedom to up and leave, I’m not sure that that advice would be available to be taken by the majority of Texans who are unsettled to various degrees with the state of the Lone State’s current legislative arrangements. Many Americans, as I’m sure you’d be aware, live from week to week on their scant wages and most have minimal savings and are in effect captured by the conditions under which they exist; their employment circumstances, the risks associated with quitting and then finding further employment, their familial circumstances such as children in school, other aspects of their social environment such as the access to friends and relatives along with extra-employment involvements as well as the uncertainties of finding accommodation in their preferred place of relocation. Easier said than done, perhaps?
And from an outsider’s perspective, a rhetorical question… where in America is any place better than any other, given the whole country is riven with dispute, dissent, fear & anger, outrage, madness, despair, crime, heartbreak and loneliness, along with failing infrastructure, pollution, political bastardry, police violence towards citizenry, citizen violence towards other citizens, and epidemics of drug abuse along with exploitation of workers that trap millions within those terrible phenomena?
I’ve only been to America once, nearly thirty years ago. I was there for six weeks on a business related matter, was shown a fair tranche of the country in the mid-west, the west coast, the south west, along with the south east, and I was very pleased to get away from the place. As an Australian, the huge differences in culture were very evident, giving me a revived and deeper appreciation for this country, and in my years working in Asia I met many Americans who were very frank about their relief to be out of the States and with no intention of ever returning. Pity for those who do not have that luxury of escape afforded them.
Laurie Anderson captures the zeitgeist well in her piece, Another Day in America, from her 2010 Homeland album.
Well said, Canguro. Outstanding comment.
Oh yes Canguro, hear hear.
A very sad but true indictment of America’s pathology and psychopathy.
I have met many Americans in America and elsewhere. They are human, they are vulnerable, they want to tell you about them but they’re not sure. They want to know who and what you are, and where’s you’re from because they’re not sure. Maybe behind their accoutrements (the most beautiful and expensive ties I ever bought) they have an itch and an inkling of their pathology.
The cashed-up musos and movie stars in the high valleys of Montana, hiding from urban America behind a quivering caldera.
The black blues and soul singers speaking of the past in subterranean taverns of down-town New York.
The Idaho spud farmer defying the desert and wondering how Oz coped.
The ancestral Norwegian / American sporting hunter in Seattle, apprehensive about drive-by shootings, wondering about gun laws in Oz.
The full-dress America General and a Californian gay paper salesman, 7th floor Hilton Al Manama, interrogating the reason for my presence.
The Californian Arab agent for Saudi royalty fleeing his hacienda within a week of 9/11.
The ex-marine now project manager cleaning oil spills in New Jersey. On Iraq, “We should’ve turned ’em all to glass.”
The construction workers on site in down-town San Diego, choking on toxic dust, poorly paid, wondering about their crushed Union.
The generational Boeing man, recognizing his talent level, left college for Boeing lifelong, talking the terror of joblessness and ruination.
The Amex man at my hotel room door in Dhaka telling me to ring my boss, pack my bags and go home as “this job is America’s.”
The bank-note printers in a KL hotel bar, 1 British, 1 American, deriding the graft, upping the ante, and finally coming to blows.
The waitress in a cafe in LA, “Golly, for an Austrian, you speak such good English.” I gave her a smile, and several tips.
‘A child in the womb, even a zygote, is important to Republicans. A child breathing in the real world is of no great concern.’
What a sentence, what an indictment, yet how true.
A free-associative long shot I realise, but when it comes to the life of a child I’m reminded of the ruthless inhumanity of the US-backed Israel-Hamas war, most especially as described by Prof John Mearsheimer in a piece for ‘Pearls & Irritations’, published on his 76th birthday, where he speaks resignedly against the the war, adding a tragic footnote:
“Perhaps the most shocking evidence of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”
Whilst the Israeli government does not speak on behalf of all its people (or apparently all Australian Jews, e.g., Louise Adler), propaganda is searingly effective when it comes to children unaware that approximately 7000 of their small kind have been killed in Gaza since Oct 7 – one child dying approximately every ten minutes according to a UNWHO spokesperson. The number of injured and maimed – injuries sometimes requiring surgery without anaesthetics – stands at around 18000, according to Al Jazeera:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/war-is-stupid-and-i-want-it-to-end-injured-palestinian-children-say#:~:text=Israeli%20attacks%20on%20the%20Gaza,many%20are%20in%20critical%20condition.&text=Deir%20el%2DBalah%2C%20Gaza%20Strip,to%20being%20wounded%20or%20killed.
A male acquaintance, a convert to Judaism, is married to a Zionist with a Holocaust background. Their two adult children sidestepped pressure to bring forth the Moshiach by, respectively, transitioning from female to male and by reproducing via surrogacy.
Back in Oz a few days following the Hamas attack (cutting short a visit to friends in Israel), the Xmas news roundup for their gentile friends included a ps that the wife’s experience had just increased her determination to fight antisemitism.
It seems children matter until they don’t.
frances, the 2,500 year old Jewish belief in the reality of a Moshiach is in the same tent as the return of Jesus, the Apocalyptic Armageddon, fairies at the bottom of the garden, humanity colonising Mars, flat earthers and young earth creationists along with the rest of the myriad raft of self-serving illusions that characterise much of human belief.
There’s a quote attributed to George Gurdjieff, and apt in this context that states “Two things in life are infinite; the stupidity of man and the mercy of God.” Ego, being the psychological beast that it is, is inclined to believe anything that serves its purpose, and I suspect that the Messianism of observing Jews fits very nicely into their world-view framework, irrespective of challengeable facticity or otherwise. The familiar images of Orthodox Jews shuckling at the Wailing Wall are testament to the rigidity of millennial beliefs that viewed in the light of the current genocidal pogrom against the Palestinians would only seem to provide further proof, as if any is needed, of the deeply poisonous nature or religiosity when used as a weapon against those of other world views.
I mention this only inasmuch as of all the Jewish peoples, whether religious or not, the Orthodox fraternity have notoriously dismissed the rest of humanity with obnoxious contempt, parading their superiority whilst condemning non-Jews as peasants, boors, pigs, cockroaches along with the rest of their pejorative assessments of those unfortunate to not belong to, as they would have it, God’s chosen people. And they wonder why antisemitism exists.
On a side note, a personal experience as a 21 year old and being asked to be the best man at the wedding of a then friend, his wife-to-be’s brother who’d recently ‘graduated’ as a religious minister in one of the minor sects suggest that we pray to God for his blessing for the day’s events whilst we were getting frocked up in our suits prior to the ceremony. To my [insert appropriate word here; shock, surprise, astonishment…] he then turned to me and said “but not you, you’re a sinner, you drink and smoke.” It kind of chilled the rest of that day’s experience for me, but in retrospect I should thank him for giving me an A-Class experience of actual religious hypocrisy at such an important time in my young adult development. To quote Gurdjieff again, he said something along the lines of “If a priest tries to make friends with you, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.”
The Australian Lighthorse is heroed in palestine where arabs and jews lived.
To solve a crisis in europe the poms dudded the arabs and made israel which has been dudding and killingpalestine’s arabs ever since.
The Arabs didn’t cause the holocaust and don’t deserve an israeli holocaust.
Australia must call for a ceasefire and withdrawal.