The Quickie: Texas GOP Considers a Platform Defining Abortion as Capital Murder

Welcome to “The Quickie” — Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s daily tipsheet on the top health care & reproductive rights stories of the day. You can read “The Quickie'' online here.

In today’s Quickie: Texas GOP considers defining abortion as capital murder and emergency care for pregnant people is still at risk.

TEXAS GOP CONSIDERS A PLATFORM DEFINING ABORTION AS CAPITAL MURDER: HuffPost reports that the Texas Republican Party is considering a platform that “appears to endorse the death penalty for abortion providers and patients.” 

“The state of Texas is a leader in controlling people with their penal system,” If/When/How senior counsel and legal director Farah Diaz-Tello told HuffPost. “If a fetus is considered a person, then it’s considered a child, which is a vulnerable population. … Homicide of identified vulnerable persons escalates penalties.”

Wendy Davis, senior adviser to Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, spoke with HuffPost about the dangerous lengths abortion opponents appear willing to go to, saying, “One of those bright lines that they appeared to believe they shouldn’t cross was a line that would hold a pregnant person criminally or civilly liable for seeking to terminate her pregnancy…That line is dangerously evaporating, and it’s evaporating purposefully because the fringe element that is more and more becoming reflective of the Republican Party writ large in Texas is having a greater and greater influence.”

Davis also explained how the platform attacks in vitro fertilization: “It’s also possible that people who refer patients traveling for abortion could be considered as ‘trafficking embryos…That raises some really major concerns as well.”

HuffPost notes that the GOP platform “also includes a slew of other far-right ideas such as proclaiming that gender-affirming care is ‘child abuse,’ requirements that Christianity and the Bible be taught in public schools, and clarifies that Texas ‘retains the right to secede from the United States.’”

Read more in HuffPost.

EMERGENCY CARE FOR PREGNANT PEOPLE IS STILL AT RISK AT THE SUPREME COURT: As the country awaits the Supreme Court’s decisions in cases that could devastate abortion access nationwide, Shireen Ghorbani — Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s chief corporate affairs officer — explains in a new op-ed exactly what is at stake if the Supreme Court ends protections for emergency abortion care for pregnant people in hospital ERs. As she details her own miscarriage, she notes that if she lived in neighboring Idaho, her ability to access care could have been very different: 

“When I had my miscarriage, I was lucky to be able to access the care I needed. At no point did my medical provider say, ‘You need this type of care, but the state won’t allow me to do it. You need to fly to another state.’ Being able to access the medical care you or your loved ones need should not be a matter of luck or timing. It’s what you and everyone deserve.”

Read the op-ed here.