No story illustrates the deep inadequacy of accusing "pro-life" Republicans of hypocrisy these days like the awful one unfolding in Texas right now. The case involves a state employee who lost a much-wanted pregnancy when her supervisors refused to let her leave work to seek medical care.
But first let’s back up a little to February 2023. The future of the abortion medication mifepristone is making headlines almost every day as a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration threatens to further decimate access to care post-Roe. It’s practically public relations Christmas for anti-abortion politicians, who are seizing every opportunity to position themselves as brave crusaders for the unborn.
Naturally, Texas’ (now-suspended) Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is among them. He’s suing the Biden administration over its “radical abortion agenda,” and, of course, he’s tweeting about it. By March, Paxton is really on a roll, issuing press release after press release about using the courts to “protect unborn life” and defend “women’s health.” He’s even got a whole section of his website dedicated to chronicling his tireless efforts, and it doesn’t lack for content. After all, Paxton made a public vow to “never stop fighting for the lives of the unborn.”
But here’s something curious: There’s no press release that touts Paxton’s March 10 filing in federal court on the matter of “unborn” life. A March 7 press release? It’s right there, all about protecting babies from the radical, pro-abortion FDA. A March 8 press release? Clear as day, detailing the threatening letters Paxton and a coalition of anti-abortion attorneys general sent to pharmacies that dare to distribute mifepristone.
But Paxton was quiet about what he did for the “unborn” on March 10. He’d be hard-pressed to justify filing that press release to his “Protect Life/Unborn” page, as he’d have to explain why, amid this flurry of “pro-life” advocacy, he told the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Texas that “fetuses” — not “unborn” babies — lack clear legal status. With a few keystrokes, the helpless Texas babies for whom Paxton would “never stop fighting” on March 7 and 8 transformed practically overnight into fetuses without rights.
Paxton contradicted in federal court not just everything he’d said that week about Texas’s deep and compelling interest in protecting life, but practically everything he’s ever said on the subject.
Just two days after threatening pharmacies for putting “women” and “unborn children” in danger by distributing perfectly legal medication, Paxton contradicted in federal court not just everything he’d said that week about Texas’s deep and compelling interest in protecting life, but practically everything he’s ever said on the subject.
To understand what brought about this transformation, we return to Salia Issa, the woman who dared to hold the state of Texas accountable for causing her to lose her pregnancy.
Issa, a state prison guard in Abilene, is why Paxton found himself in federal court, filing arguments that Texas owes her nothing after she experienced a stillbirth at seven months of pregnancy after her supervisors repeatedly denied her requests to leave work when she experienced pain during her shift. Importantly, the state of Texas doesn’t dispute Issa’s account of the events of November 2021, including that her supervisor accused her of lying and then waited more than two hours to assign a new guard to Issa’s post so she could go to the hospital. There, medical professionals told her they could have saved her baby if she’d arrived sooner.
Not 48 hours after Paxton bragged about making the defense of unborn life his sole concern, the attorney general conspicuously abandoned the sanctimonious language of a benevolent patriarch dedicated to protecting “women” and “the unborn,” and replaced it with terms like “correctional officer” and “fetus.”
It would be easy to call out as hypocrisy the sudden rejection of Texas’ long-held insistence that, as the Texas Tribune put it, “‘unborn children’ be recognized as people starting at fertilization” the moment the state encounters an inconvenient fetus.
Many have done just that, and on the surface, hypocrisy would seem to suit. After all, Texas Republicans would have us believe that in this self-proclaimed “pro-life” state, no priority is higher than the protection of pregnant women and unborn children. As such, Texas should have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to try to make things right with Issa and her husband, or as right as it can after such a devastating loss. But instead of offering to compensate this family for their child’s death and this woman’s trauma at the hands of the state — which good conscience and moral obligation should compel any truly “pro-life” person or entity to do — Texas is trying to wash its hands of the whole thing, arguing there’s simply no clear legal basis for treating a fetus lost at seven months’ gestation as a person. (The state has also claimed that pregnancy discrimination and sex-based discrimination against women are unrelated, which would seem to contradict its investment in state-sanctioned transphobia.)
But this is not hypocrisy — this is ideological consistency. It is business as usual.
But this is not hypocrisy — this is ideological consistency. It is business as usual. And it tracks with the only record the Lone Star State has when it comes to the health of pregnant Texans and Texas children: a deadly one.
Maternal mortality rates in Texas are on the rise and have been for decades; today, they are the highest in the country and disproportionately so for Black women. Since Texas began enforcing its six-week abortion ban in 2021, infant deaths have increased over 11 percent. Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature has for years refused to implement common-sense measures, like strengthening and expanding its social safety net or improving access to health care, that would make the state safer for pregnant Texans and kids. Texas’s foster care system has long been better at endangering children than protecting them, and its awful inadequacies have gone unaddressed year after year after year. This summer, Gov. Greg Abbott defended Operation Lone Star, his cruel program terrorizing migrants who attempt to cross the Rio Grande, after news broke that a 4-year-old girl had fainted after being caught in Abbott’s razor-wire river barrier and a 19-year-old woman miscarried while entangled in the same vicious wire. And just weeks ago, attorneys for the state argued in open court that if women face fertility challenges as a result of being denied abortions under state law, they have no standing to challenge the law since they may never be pregnant again anyway.
Hypocrisy? Barely. At best.
It may not sound “pro-life” that Texas has eschewed responsibility for state-induced miscarriages for residents and migrants alike, or failed to provide adequate care and resources to pregnant Texans, or repeatedly shirked its responsibility to protect children in state custody, or shrugged at rendering Texas women infertile. And yet everything about these things is “pro-life,” because these are the policies, positions and programs that “pro-life” politicians have long prioritized, whatever lip-service they pay to defending the unborn and protecting women. Crying hypocrisy only perpetuates anti-abortion politicians’ convenient fiction that “pro-life” means anything other than endangering pregnant people, children and families. It’s why allegations of hypocrisy never stick, despite the fact that Republicans repeatedly ignore or outright reject opportunities to foster the conditions under which people would feel most able to raise healthy families and to continue healthy pregnancies. Republicans know this. Republican voters know it, too: “Pro-life” is rhetorical sleight-of-hand for “pro-control” — and nothing else.
If it were otherwise, the U.S. would have seen waves of legislation in support of pregnant people and children after the fall of Roe, especially in states like Texas where abortion is banned. But despite having had nearly 50 years to develop such policies and legislation while the anti-abortion movement worked to topple Roe, these “pro-life” politicians have done little to nothing, even in the dozens of state legislative sessions convened in the year since Dobbs. They’ve had plenty of time to put in place policies and programs that genuinely “defend life” and protect “women’s health.” They instead chose simply to ban abortion and to criminalize pregnant people and abortion providers and call it a day.
“Pro-life” is rhetorical sleight-of-hand for “pro-control” — and nothing else.
Anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists have been trying to find a way to establish fetal personhood for decades; their efforts have historically failed in part because voters rightly recognize that such a move would be disastrously weaponized to exert even more control over people’s bodies. And yet here with Issa's case is the possibility of establishing fetal personhood in federal law — by agreeing with these plaintiffs’ arguments that fetuses’ lives are protected under the 14th Amendment — and Texas has run the other way. Why? Because it would pose a small economic inconvenience to the state’s bottom line? Because Texas would have to take responsibility for its actions? Because Texas will not require of itself what its “pro-life” politicians believe they have the right to force every pregnant person to do?
What better proof could we ask for? Forcing a woman seven-months pregnant to stay at her guard post instead of allowing her to seek treatment for a miscarriage is not contrary to “pro-life” values; it is emblematic of them. Refusing to compensate a state employee for a pregnancy loss for which the state is culpable is not “pro-life” hypocrisy. It is a powerfully effective and eminently “pro-life” means of protecting Texas Republicans’ true top priority: ensuring the state has the ultimate say when it comes to Texans’ reproductive lives.