For nearly 13 hours June 25, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D-District 10) filibustered Senate Bill 5, a bill that regulates the administration of abortions in Texas. These regulations would prohibit any abortion performed at or after 20 weeks post-fertilization. The bill provides no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. SB5 also places a heavy burden on abortion providers to be licensed as “ambulatory surgery centers,” a designation afforded to health care facilities that provide only out-patient surgical procedures such as colonoscopies and knee replacements.
Many groups estimate that only five clinics in the entire state of Texas would be able to afford the $1 million cost associated with complying with the ambulatory surgery center regulations. With the exception of a sole Democratic co-author of the bill, support for SB5 fell strictly down party lines, and the overwhelming Republican majority – the Texas senate is currently made up of 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats – ensured that, were this bill brought to a vote, it would pass.
Actually, substantive debate over SB5 is not required by the legislative system of Texas: Republican senators – again, with only one exception – wrote the bill, the Republican governor called a special session of the legislature specifically to bring this bill to the floor, and Republican senators have the manpower to immediately bring the bill to a vote – a vote they know beforehand that they will win – without debate.
Sen. Davis did not filibuster this bill because, as some have claimed, she was afraid of having a debate about the bill’s consequences – “debate” was not an option on the table. She filibustered the bill because it was the only option afforded to her by the legislative system of Texas to, as she saw it, defend the civil rights of her constituents.
Despite the fact this bill would apply only to the state of Texas, the fight of Sen. Davis is our fight as well. No matter what opinion you hold on the practice of abortion, reproductive rights are civil rights. Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, we should all be appalled at the group of people who think it is within the purview of their position to determine what a woman can or cannot do with her body.
The seven men and two women who wrote SB5 view pregnant women – regardless of the way in which they were impregnated – not as human beings with all the civil rights associated with that status, but as mere shells carrying a human being inside them.
To anyone who would approve of this bill, pregnant women are not humans; they are UPS trucks. It does not matter whether you consider yourself “pro-life” or “pro-choice.” It only matters whether or not you consider yourself a human. I say again, emphatically: Reproductive rights are civil rights.
Sexual justice is not a topic that we can brush aside. Sexual justice is at the very core of who we are as a nation. Man or woman, gay or straight, Republican or Democrat: If you are not actively fighting for sexual justice in this country, then you are complicit in the systematic attempt to declare an entire group of human beings as less than human.
Joey Gamble is a senior majoring in English.
