Texas Republicans are open to using the death penalty on abortion providers, according to a new proposal from the state party.
Last weekend, Republican delegates at the Republican convention in Texas voted on a 2024 party platform that proclaims “abortion is not health care, it’s murder” and proposes enacting a state law that would protect abortion providers from charges of murder. In Texas, capital murder is punishable by death. Killing a child under the age of 15 can qualify as capital murder, the most serious form of murder.
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Elsewhere on the platform, the Texas Republican Party is calling for “legislation to abolish abortion by immediately ensuring the right to life and equal protection of the laws for all newborn children from the moment of conception.”
That language, as highlighted by feminist writer Jessica Valenti, which first drew attention to it earlier this week, draws on the rhetoric of “abortion abolitionists,” a fringe, hardline part of the anti-abortion movement that has moved closer to the mainstream in recent years. While the mainstream anti-abortion movement generally favors exempting women who seek abortions from punishment, abortion abolitionists adhere to what they see as a more consistent logic: if a fetus is a person and abortion is murder, then abortion patients deserve it to be punished as murderers. .
Abortion patients are not mentioned in the provision in the proposed platform that redefines abortion as murder, leaving its implications for abortion seekers unclear. Abortion bans typically target punitive abortion providers, not patients.
Punishing women for abortions is a politically toxic stance, especially as support for abortion rights has surged in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade. Even before Roe fell, Texas lawmakers repeatedly introduced bills that would have established the death penalty for abortion patients. They all remained stuck in the Republican-dominated state legislature.
Regardless of the platform’s implications for abortion patients, adding language that effectively defines fetuses as people, complete with full legal rights and protections, could have enormous ramifications for large swathes of Texas law, including cutting off access to in vitro fertilisation. In anti-abortion circles, efforts to establish “fetal personhood” have gained momentum in recent years, but experts say the full implications of this ideology have never been realized. Earlier this year, IVF treatments in Alabama were temporarily halted after the Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were “intrauterine children.”
Home to one in 10 American women of reproductive age, Texas has long been a key laboratory for activists and lawmakers seeking to refine bills that limit reproductive rights — many of which are exported to other state legislatures across the country.
In the 50-page platform, the Texas GOP also calls homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice” and says providing gender-affirming care to minors is “child abuse.” The platform demands that the recent renaming of military bases be reversed to “publicly honor Southern heroes,” and affirms that the platform “supports the affirmation of God, including prayer, the Bible, and the return of the Ten Commandments to our schools, courthouses and other government buildings”.
Although Republicans voted on the proposed platform this weekend, votes were expected to be counted this week. The Republican Party in Texas did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the platform has been formally adopted or on its approach to abortion. The party platform is not a legislative plan; these proposals may never make it into bills, let alone pass.
The Texas state legislature, which meets only in odd-numbered years, will open in January 2025.
