Last Friday, the Republican-dominated Texas State Legislature voted 96 to 47 to require fetal remains from abortions be buried or cremated despite the United States Supreme Court ruling such restrictions unconstitutional in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt last year, according to the New York Times.
The bill is almost identical to Indiana’s HEA 1337, signed into law last year by then-Governor Mike Pence, demanding similar measures.
Commemorating a lost pregnancy with a memorial is a deeply heart-wrenching and personal experience that some women choose to have. Texas, however, is morphing this choice into a grotesque mandate with a newly approved House bill that would force every terminated pregnancy to end in a “fetal funeral,” miscarried or aborted.
Senate Bill 8 would require all health facilities in which women either abort or miscarry a fetus to perform fetal funerals via burial or cremation. Patients would not be able to waive this practice.
The bill states that health providers would lose their medical license and that women who fail to comply could face a $1,000 civil penalty, according to the Huffington Post.
Additionally, the law would effectively preclude all abortions after 13 weeks of pregnancy by prohibiting dilation and evacuation procedures, a common practice that removes fetal remains from a woman’s uterus to avoid infection and disease. The bill would also ban donating fetal tissue for medical research.
Moving forward, the bill will likely be blocked by a federal judge. In December, U.S. Federal District Judge Sam Sparks blocked a similar anti-choice bill in Texas after the state was sued by the Center for Reproductive Rights, calling the language of the bill “unconstitutionally vague.”
In actionable terms, hours spent drafting the bill and hearing heartfelt testimonies from pro-life legislators on the House floor will mean nothing. But even if the fetal funeral rule never reaches a single health facility in Texas, pro-life lawmakers’ persistence to pass this unjustifiable legislation is enough of an offense.
Republican-controlled state governments, like those of Texas, Indiana and Louisiana, avoid efforts to perfect public health legislation by trying to make misogynistic decorum the law of the state. These bills befuddle obstetrics and gynecologists and go against data in peer-reviewed medical journals.
Nevertheless, they persist.
In spite of medical evidence and human decency, pro-life politicians will stop at nothing to make nonsense the law of the land.
An extraordinary amount of time is wasted in statehouses across the country as pro-life lawmakers try to build a false ethos around miscarried and aborted fetuses. It’s not so much that the bills themselves are offensive to women and mothers—they obviously are. Instead, it’s more about the gradual recession of women’s dignity by legislating these offensive and shameful procedures.
The constant politicization of female reproduction reinforces the notion that women are vessels for the potential of life and are incapable of creating their own futures. Plainly, Texas’ fetal funeral bill is disrespectful.
Sadly, it’s not surprising and surely not the worst thing we’ll see on reproductive legislation this year.
jsbourkl@indiana.edu
@js_bourkland
