The Texas Taliban continues its war on women, Amanda Marcotte reports. Fetal heartbeat this time. Got a heart beat? Abortion forbidden! Slut leaves the fetus there long enough to develop a pulse, she’s stuck with it, the slut.
Like the lush at the bar who can’t stop himself from ordering one more round, some Texas Republicans don’t know when it’s time to give it up for the night. Drunk off the win of passing a bill into law that will shut down most abortion clinics in the state and ban abortions after 20 weeks, three Republican state legislators introduced yet another anti-abortion bill Thursday.
This one, which is even less likely to get far in the lower courts than the one Rick Perry just signed, would ban all abortions after a heartbeat can be detected through a transvaginal ultrasound. That means it could ban abortions as early as six weeks, though functionally, I can’t imagine many doctors would be willing to practice abortion at all for fear that anti-choicers would claim that they didn’t try hard enough to find the heartbeat.
That fetal heartbeat is what killed Savita Halappanavar. It’s what puts women in some Catholic hospitals in the US at risk if they develop life-threatening conditions while pregnant. It’s a tyrant.