Despite valiant efforts from protesters and pro-choice politicians, Texas’s state House of Representatives has “tentatively approved” the ultraconservative anti-abortion Senate Bill 5, the Texas Tribune reports. The bill
would ban abortion at 20-weeks gestation, require physicians that perform the procedure to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, require abortions to be performed in ambulatory surgical centers and require doctors administering abortion-inducing drugs to do so in person.
(The fun thing about admitting privileges is that a clinic often has to send a certain number of patients to the hospital per month or year in order to maintain privileges. Abortion clinics usually don’t meet these quotas because the procedure is so safe that there is rarely ever a reason to admit a patient to the hospital.)
Jezebel has some good commentary about the bill, including one of its authors’ extraordinarily nonsensical assertion that rape kits are equivalent to abortions (“a woman can get cleaned out”), and therefore the bill can have no exceptions for rape or incest.
Here’s hoping this legislation doesn’t make it through the state Senate—it would be a huge blow to reproductive rights in Texas.
