The Republican Party of Texas is considering a platform that appears to endorse the death penalty for abortion providers and patients.
Texas delegates voted on a 2024 platform at the state GOP convention on Saturday and aim to have votes counted by Wednesday to finalize their platform for the coming year. The proposal called for new legislation to enshrine the ideology of fetal personhood in law, define abortion care as murder and criminalize in vitro fertilization, as first reported by feminist writer Jessica Valenti.
The 50-page document also includes a host of other far-right ideas, such as proclaiming that gender-affirming care is “child abuse,” requiring Christianity and the Bible to be taught in public schools, and clarifying that Texas “reserves the right to secede from the United States.”
The platform is seen more as a wish list than a binding document, but it is a critical reflection of how far right the Republican Party of Texas has moved in recent years.
The GOP platform calls for ‘equal protection of the law for all newborn children from the moment of conception’, and later states that ‘abortion is not health care, it is murder’. The phrase “equal protection of the law” is used in the anti-choice movement to define abortion as murder, and to criminalize abortion doctors and patients as murderers.
The Republican Party of Texas did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Texel has more people executed than any other state in the country. It’s not a big leap that murder charges against someone the state believes killed a child would carry the death penalty.
“The state of Texas is a leader in controlling people with its criminal justice system,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at Lawyering for Reproductive Justice: If/When/How. “If a fetus is considered a person, it is also considered a child, which is a vulnerable population. … Murder of identified vulnerable persons leads to escalating punishment.”
As Valenti notes, South Carolina And Georgia recently attempted to pass legislation, the Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which aimed to make abortion punishable as murder under state criminal codes. Lawmakers in Texas have also proposed legislation — often referred to as “repealing abortion laws” — to erase the distinction between abortion and murder.
Even within the anti-choice movement, prosecuting an abortion patient is a fringe belief. Most anti-abortion laws include carve-outs to ensure that a woman is not criminalized because of her pregnancy outcome (although many have been arresteddespite these laws).
“I wish I could say that the idea of the death penalty is a leap of faith, but it’s not,” Diaz-Tello said, adding that for the anti-abortion movement in Texas it is “actually the next logical step .”
The platform also addressed two major abortion issues before the Supreme Court this session: the use of abortion pills And life-saving abortion care in medical emergencies. The document endorsed the ban on the “manufacture, importation, sale, dispensation and use of abortifacients,” which Texas currently does. It also states that they support Texas’ current emergency medical exception within the state’s near-total abortion ban, adding that while the exception language should not be changed, “implementation does need to be addressed” — likely referring to the dozens of women in Texas who have almost died because they were denied life-saving abortion care.
