The anti-life cruelty of forcing Kate Cox to flee Texas to end a nonviable pregnancy | Opinion

When Donald Trump said in 2016 that women who get abortions should be subjected to “some form of punishment,” I thought well, the poor thing clearly has no idea that that isn’t how real pro-lifers think or talk.

Actual pro-life advocates, as I wrote at the time, just about blew a fuse when they heard Trump’s comment.

One of the activists I quoted that day, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said, “Mr. Trump’s comment today is completely out of touch with the pro-life movement. Being pro-life means wanting what is best for the mother and the baby. … No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion. This is against the very nature of what we are about.”

To me, it was. But as it turned out, more than a few pro-life officeholders are actually quite keen to punish women who choose abortion.

“The most pro-life president ever,” as some saw him, never did see that respect for life is also supposed to extend to women, and Muslims, and the dissenters from Trumpism that he has recently started calling “vermin.”

In 2018, Trump said the immigrants his administration was deporting “are not people. These are animals.” His son Eric said the same thing about Democrats: “To me, they’re not even people.”

I never understood how a pro-life person could mock a physical disability, or call the Paralympics “tough to watch,” or say this about refugees: “I guarantee you they are bad.” His administration hustled to execute as many severely abused and brain-damaged death row inmates as possible before Joe Biden could get in there and show them some mercy, damn him.

But then, “pro-life” has always meant very different things to different people. And some who identify themselves that way obviously do want to penalize women, no matter why they’re aborting.

That’s why Kate Cox has had to flee Texas to end a wanted pregnancy that was nonviable, life-threatening and a risk to her ability to have more children, as she and her husband very much want to do.

“I just never thought I’d be in the situation I’m in right now,” she wrote in an op-ed in The Dallas Morning News. “Twenty weeks pregnant with a baby that won’t survive and could jeopardize my health and a future pregnancy.”

A 31-year-old mother of two, Cox had been to the emergency room at least three times, according to a legal filing, experiencing “severe cramping, diarrhea, and leaking unidentifiable fluid.” Under those circumstances, what kind of a monster would deny her the compassion and care she needs?

Meet Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who was impeached by his fellow Trumpublicans earlier this year, over bribery and corruption charges.

He decided that Cox’s doctor and hospital should face “civil and criminal liability” including “first-degree felonies” if they help her end her medical nightmare.

Paxton, who is not a doctor, and would no longer be an attorney general, either, if Trump had not pressured Texas lawmakers to reconsider his removal, somehow determined that Cox’s doctor had not met “all of the elements necessary to fall within an exception to Texas’ abortion laws.” The judge who found otherwise, he said, was likewise “not medically qualified to make this determination.” But Paxton is?

In response to his appeal, the Texas Supreme Court blocked and then overturned the ruling that would have allowed her to end her pregnancy even under the state’s near-total abortion ban.

And Paxton, unfortunately, is far from the only abortion opponent who wants to do what movement leaders have for many years said they would never do, which is treat women who abort as criminals.

Some lawmakers in Missouri, Kentucky, Georgia and South Carolina have pushed legislation that would charge women who get abortions with murder.

This cruelty is why, even in red states, where a high percentage of voters see themselves as pro-life, antiabortion ballot initiatives keep losing. If more of those who support abortion limits also supported these measures, they wouldn’t keep flying into the side of a mountain in places like Kansas and Kentucky and Ohio.

Could that be happening because most voters who identify as pro-life actually believed that meant supporting women in crisis pregnancies instead of shackling them?

The problem for the pro-life movement post-Dobbs is not, as Rs keep arguing, a messaging problem.

It’s that the message from, for example, those South Carolina lawmakers who want to subject women who abort to the death penalty is both clear and terrifying.