Sen. Eckhardt: The threat to our most basic human rights is grave

A woman’s right to decide whether, when and with whom to have children is being hunted to extinction in Texas and across the United States. The leaked Supreme Court opinion indicates that, soon, women across the country will experience the post-Roe world Texas women have been living in since September.

Republicans have not hidden the fact that they are hell-bent on undermining the right of women to seek abortions. For decades, the GOP has been stacking the judiciary with partisans for the purpose of undermining abortion access. In the 2016 campaign, candidate Trump vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade. This past session, the Texas Legislature passed SB 8 - a malicious legislative circumvention of Roe v. Wade that functionally banned abortions by unleashing vigilantes on friends, family and health care workers who assist women in obtaining abortions.

More: Abortion would be illegal in Texas if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

Authoritarian acts often masquerade as protection. The leadership in Texas ludicrously claims it is protecting women. Do not be fooled. Texas is dead last in health care coverage. One in four Texas women of child-bearing age don’t have health insurance - twice the national average. Texas is in the throes of a maternal mortality crisis for Black women who are more than twice as likely to die in or after childbirth than white women, and studies project that restrictive abortion laws will only exacerbate the crisis further.

Texas abortion laws do not make exceptions for pregnancy from rape. In Texas, just 9% of Texas victims report their assaults, and approximately 5% of those few who are accused of rape are ever arrested. With the Supreme Court set to overturn Roe v. Wade, a so-called “Trigger Law” will go into effect, making performing an abortion a felony punishable by life in prison and fines up to $100,000. We are close to a day in Texas when a doctor providing health care to a victim of rape is more likely to be imprisoned than the rapist himself.

The leadership in Texas wants to force women into childbirth. But after the child is born, the state abandons the child and her mother. One in five children in Texas goes hungry. The Texas Foster Care system is in a full blown crisis, rife with child abuse, forcing vulnerable children to sleep in hotels and offices, and losing children altogether.

Republicans’ desire to crush women’s reproductive autonomy will not end with abortion. Conservative crosshairs have already begun turning on women accessing contraception. Republicans seek a world where abortion is inaccessible and unwanted pregnancies are unavoidable. It is an all-out war on the freedom and autonomy of women.

For those who feel that a woman’s rights do not impact them personally, consider the consequences of this unraveling of human rights. Our state has a long history for the suppression of rights: of women, of people of color, of labor unions, of non-Christians, of LGBTQ people, of immigrants, of science, of learning, and of voting. If the Texas Legislature can run a dagger through the hearts of the rights of women, they can do so to other protected classes as well.

In the draft decision released, a majority of Supreme Court Justices signaled a willingness to reconsider rights guaranteed under equal protection and due process clauses. This jeopardizes civil rights victories that overturned “separate but equal” education, same-sex marriage bans, and interracial marriage bans.

The threat to our rights is grave. But we are patriots. We will march, we will organize, we will vote. We will hold officials accountable for their authoritarian attempts to divide us and set us against one another. The State of Texas and the United States Supreme Court have proven they are unwilling to defend our most basic rights, so we must defend them ourselves using the tools of democracy.

Eckhardt, a Democrat, represents Travis and Bastrop counties in the Texas Senate.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Sen. Eckhardt: The threat to our most basic human rights is grave