A Democratic-led filibuster, wrangling over rules, and interruptions by protestors made it so difficult for lawmakers to vote on a pro-life bill in Texas last night that it failed to pass before the midnight deadline, forcing the legislature to call another special session if they want to pass the bill.
LifeNews is reporting that that the bill, known as SB-5, passed the Texas Senate on a 19-12 vote minutes after the midnight deadline. The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks, force abortion clinics to meet basic health and safety standards, require all doctors providing abortions to secure admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and assure that chemical (RU-486) abortions are performed according to FDA safety standards.
These are the same kind of regulations that have been imposed in many states in recent years and resulted in shuttering many abortion clinics that have been offering sub-standard care to women.
However, instead of seeing this as the pro-woman bill that it is, state Democrats led by Wendy Davis, and a mob of pro-abortion supporters, using the usual "war on women" rhetorical distortions, managed to create enough chaos to stall the vote long enough to force it passed the midnight deadline.
"Thousands of orange-clad abortion-rights activists who packed the Texas Capitol all day began roaring louder and louder until they literally shouted down the final minutes of the 30-day special session before Republicans could pass the bill. What followed was three hours of confusion during which no one was sure if the bill actually passed," wrote Carolyn Jones of The Texas Observer, who was obviously in support of the bill's defeat.
"Republican senators were running around claiming the bill had passed before a midnight deadline, but many observers who watched the debate live didn’t see it that way. The initial time stamp on the Capitol website and on Senate documents placed the vote at 12:02 or 12:03 on June 26. But then someone mysteriously changed the time stamp to make it appear SB 5 passed before the deadline . . ."
Just after 3:00 a.m., however, the Senate reconvened and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurt announced that SB 5 had not passed before the deadline.
He then walked over to the press table to meet with reporters. “This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “An unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics has tried all day to derail legislation that has been intended to protect the lives and the safety of women and babies. … I’m very frustrated… I didn’t lose control of what we were doing. We had an unruly mob of hundreds, if not thousands, of people in here, and we couldn’t communicate with our members.”
All the commotion may be for naught, however, as everyone expects Gov. Rick Perry to call another special session where the bill is expected to pass - again.
Everyone who values human life sees the debacle in Texas as an astonishing abuse of power by pro-abortion lawmakers who twist the facts and whip up hysteria among the populace to make it look as if everyone is trying to deprive women of their rights rather than to protect them from unscrupulous abortionists who have been butchering women and viable infants for decades with impunity.
These wild-eyed, hysteria-inducing ideologues that run around screaming "the sky is falling" on women's rights are actually hurting their cause more than helping.
For example, in New York last week, their insistence that the state's senate vote on Governor Cuomo's Women's Equality Bill with its hyper-abortion plank intact, caused the entire bill to fail, thus robbing women of tougher laws against sexual harassment, unequal pay, sexual trafficking and domestic violence. They were willing to sacrifice all of this in exchange for making abortion into a human right, all the while making the disingenuous claim that if a woman can't make "choices" about her own body she really can't enjoy any of these other rights anyway. Their all-or-nothing strategy backfired and the bill failed to pass, leaving women in the state with nothing all because someone thought abortion was more important than any other right.
We can only pray that women stop buying into this nonsense and those of us who know better will use every means possible to convince them that the last place they're going to find better health care and the treatment they deserve is in an abortion clinic.
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