By Katrina Custardo
There is a new bill that just passed through the Texas Senate and is now heading to the House that attacks a woman’s right to having a safe abortion in the second trimester. The bill specifically attacks “dismemberment abortions,” which it defines as “an abortion in which a person, with the purpose of causing the death of an unborn child, dismembers the unborn child and extracts the unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors, or a similar instrument that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slices, crushes, or grasps, or performs any combination of those actions on a piece of the unborn child’s body to cut or rip the piece from the body.”
First of all, the actual medical term for an abortion as the one (somewhat) described above is called dilation and evacuation. This type of abortion typically takes place around the 13th week of pregnancy, when the fetus is exactly that, a fetus. According to the Mayo Clinic, a fetus’ intestines are starting to develop as well as tissue for future bones and will be smaller than three and a half inches. Therefore, not a child yet. At 13 weeks, the woman wouldn’t even be able to identify the sex of the fetus or see the skeleton.
That is just the beginning of the problems with this bill. For one, it is a further attack on women’s rights in Texas, which already has one of the toughest stances on abortion. Second, this bill was passed by the Texas Senate, which only has eight women among its 31 members. Even though seven of these women voted to pass the bill, this is still not representative of an equal ratio between men and women.
Besides this, men shouldn’t even be involved in bills relating to women’s bodies and women’s health care.
I am very pro-choice, but that doesn’t mean I am pro-abortion, which is what a lot of “pro-life” people think of pro-choicers. This is why this bill affects me so much, even though it is in a different state. It is taking away choices of fellow women, which is something I do not, and will not, ever stand for. Pro-choice is exactly that: we want women to have the freedom to choose. We want women to have the power to make decisions about their lives without having to cater to these old men in suits, who, by the way, will never have to get an abortion. They are, literally, completely out of their element.
Another worrying sign is that this bill exists in the first place. Anti-abortion bills have been sprouting up all over the country, all attacking the rights women deserve to have. I am worried to see a bill like this pop up in Iowa, because then it will affect me and my female friends I have here at the university. On Feb. 2, Senate File 2 passed the Iowa Senate and has since moved on to subcommittees, a bill that aims to defund Planned Parenthood in Iowa.
I have my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and I don’t deserve to lose those. Neither do my female friends. Texas, among other states, has started to take those rights away from the women of those states. Those women do not deserve to lose their rights either.