Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnd999 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

The good news is that with so many folks coming in, the state has become quite purple. I wouldn't be surprised to see it become blue in the next decade. California did the same thing in the 90s.

10 years is a long time. Plus republicans won't give up without a fight.

I hope TX does turn blue eventually

Can you elaborate? I'm not from the U.S but I'm curious.

Texas is extremely hostile to abortion or legislation to fund matters related to reproductive health.

To be fair, in Texas you can get access to all forms of birth control and family planning except abortions, and even then they're available very early in a pregnancy, in most cases you can get access to these services for free all over the state.

Texas and a lot of more conservative states are hostile to abortions, but hostility to other forms of birth control and family planning are really a myth at this point that was true in a previous era but no longer true at all.

It's somewhat complicated by the issues around the "reproductive health" organizations focusing heavily on minority areas and aggressively promoting abortion and sterilization as a means of controlling poverty growth. There are people on both sides of the issue that don't really like that strategy despite it being very prevalent in traditionally progressive areas/states.

Texas just banned abortions... and further relaxed gun laws

The poster needs the ability to terminate any unplanned pregnancies that may occur

Banning abortions doesn't just affect unplanned pregnancies.

A few weeks after Texas adopted the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, Dr. Andrea Palmer delivered terrible news to a Fort Worth patient who was midway through her pregnancy.

The fetus had a rare neural tube defect. The brain would not develop, and the infant would die at birth or shortly afterward. Carrying the pregnancy to term would be emotionally grueling and would also raise the mother’s risk of blood clots and severe postpartum bleeding, the doctor warned.

But the patient was past six weeks’ gestation, and under the new law, an abortion was not an option in Texas because the woman was not immediately facing a life-threatening medical crisis or risk of permanent disability.

“So we look at them like a ticking time bomb and wait for the complications to develop,” Dr. Palmer said of her patients.

In this case, the woman had the means to travel, and she obtained an abortion in another state, an option unavailable to many low-income and working class women.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/health/texas-abortion-law...

The way the Texas law is written it impacts anyone who helps facilitate terminating a pregnancy. Simply walking your friend into an abortion clinic past 6 weeks (which is 6 weeks since the last period) makes you liable.

they want to have abortions and it's hard to get them in texas

*progressive/liberal woman.

To be fair, I believe Conservatives of female persuasion would find it a reasonably comfortable place (I may disagree with that perspective, but we should ignore / pretend it doesn't exist at out peril. 76mil votes for Trump 2020 were not all cast by males. On more personal / closer to home note, a number of my exes would agree with Texas laws more than their/our own Ontario laws and culture. ).

It's even true for many conservative women. It's only relatively recently that no-compromise anti-abortion views came to dominate in US "conservative" spaces. Consider, for example, Republican Majority for Choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Majority_for_Choice

They shut down in 2018, a decision explained here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/abortion-rights-r...

This was driven by a shift in US evangelicals. At one point being a pro-choice evangelical was a reasonable theological position. Now most evangelicals won't even admit that ever happened: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-bib...

As someone who routinely crosses state lines, I can't imagine what type of situation would make the need to get an abortion such a common occurrence that it would be the sole factor in deciding what state you'd live in.

That's a valid point on its own, however, I imagine for many, (rightly or wrongly) perceived stance of a state or institution toward abortion is a summarized proxy for stance toward women's rights. In other words, there's an assumed correlation that a place that so vehemently, consistently tries so darn tootin' hard to limit abortion rights, may have other similar perspectives vis-a-vis women's rights, if not minority rights in general.

Women have life-threatening complications at the same rate regardless of their political beliefs.

From Wikipedia [1]: "The act contains exceptions in the case of medical emergency but not for rape or incest."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Texas_Heartbeat_A...

The article does touch on abortions, but brushes it off in a way that I found rather shocking given the gravity of the situation.

20+ year Texas resident here. The abortion law was, I believe, mostly passed in order to attempt to keep progressives from moving to Texas. The state legislature and governor know that it is most likely to be struck down by the courts. Therefore, it will be gone and out of the way before the next election, so they don't face much of a backlash, but it may keep a bunch of Californian Democrats who might otherwise move here and vote, from moving here. On the other hand, any Californian Republicans who move here, they would like to get, because Texas has been moving from deep red to purplish red in recent years. It's still for sure a right-leaning state, but an influx of Democratic voters, while small compared to the existing population, could well be enough to tip the balance in a Democratic-favorable year.

The problem is that even if everything you're saying is true, the signaling is enough to have a tremendous chilling effect on actual, material access to abortion in Texas.

The Texas government definitely views women as second class citizens.

Or perhaps the Texas people view the unborn as first class citizens.

Nah. If children were all that important, they'd be doing a lot more than passing laws to control women's bodies.

Heck, the whole problem of abortion could be solved by controlling men's bodies. We are, after all, involved in 100% of unwanted pregnancies. Mandatory reversible vasectomies at puberty for all men would be a big step forward. And for men who slip up and impregnate somebody who doesn't want to carry to term, mandatory surrogacy payments to the woman from garnished wages to cover the work and expense.

And that's before we get to other obvious things like 100% free prenatal, birth, and postpartum care, plus a robust parental support system including visiting nurses, child health care, and subsidized child care so that women can quickly return to the workforce.

> Mandatory reversible vasectomies

They can’t mandate that reversal shall work; the failure rate starts at 5% and goes up over time.

Surely a small price to pay if you believe, as the anti-abortion people do, that you're saving lives.

More practically, I expect that research into higher-quality reversible vasectomies would be swift and well-funded if they were mandatory in Texas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com