"Your DNA is mine, little girl!"

Posted by Bruce Wilson at 7:41 AM on March 6, 2007.

Molly Ivins once called Texas the national laboratory for bad government. To cite only one example, laws regulating abortion just don't come much worse than ours.

There is a growing trend for politicians to dodge this powder keg issue by mouthing innocuous-sounding platitudes about "reducing the number of abortions." But with a Christian right-approved Democratic initiative as political cover, two Republican state legislators are leading a full-on charge, mounted for battle on a Trojan donkey.

Should they succeed, the confidentiality of personal information, and medical privacy as we know it, will become a thing of the past for women in Texas.

So writes the anonymous journalist "moiv", who in the past year and a half has covered the Texas GOP's assault on reproductive rights in the Lone Star State with an intensity almost certainly unmatched by any journalist on the planet. In "Your DNA Is Mine, Little Girl", moiv describes a new Texas State bill that, overriding parental authority, would collect genetic information on minors. In Medical Privacy? Have an Abortion and Kiss It Good-Bye moiv describes a new bill that would require women in Texas who get abortions to provide extensive personal information as a precondition of the procedure ( see inside for excerpt of story )

Meanwhile Wade Horn, the head of the 47 Billion dollar federal Health and Human Services Agency has been caught doling out a contract of almost 1 million dollars to an organization he himself founded, and the 20 million member hard-right Southern Baptist Convention has decided to oppose oral contraceptives on the basis that they are "abortificants".

On the brighter side however, a new soon to be released documentary on the politics of abortion in the United States, "Lake Of Fire", will show a face of the US antiabortion movement seldom given media attention - "religiously inspired domestic terrorism". Also, a new biography of anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly challenges the view that the rise of the US Christian right was powered merely by right wing think tanks, by highlighting Schlafly's substantial track record of mobilizing and organizing American conservative women ; "Schlafly drove feminists crazy, both because she out-organized them, and because she should have been one of them."

[ from "Your DNA Is Mine, Little Girl" ]

The Christian right in Texas has a whole pack of pet politicians, and one of its "alpha dogs" is Rep. Robert Talton (right), a homophobe extraordinaire who distinguished himself by authoring our state's 2005 amendment to preserve the "sanctity of marriage," and by opposing adoption by gay or lesbian parents on direct orders from God. In a statehouse where intrusive anti-choice legislation is the norm, only a spectacularly outrageous bill stands out from the herd. But with credentials like his, Bob Talton is just the man for the job.

What about legislation stripping parents of legal rights over what happens to their daughter in the event that she should have an abortion before age 14? What about a bill ordering doctors, under penalty of law, to preserve tissue from their daughter's body, and turn that tissue over to the state police for DNA analysis? What about a bill subjecting her equally young boyfriend to prosecution as a sex offender  -- even though both sets of parents only wanted their children left alone?

In addition to parental consent for abortion, parents' rights are the rationale that "social conservatives" trot out for justifying everything from private school vouchers to abstinence-only education to opposition to the HPV vaccine. So coming from Bob Talton, a bill nullifying parental rights is pretty unusual -- but not as strange as the reason that a bill like this one makes the Christian right so happy.

One of the most cherished myths of religiously motivated anti-choice crusaders is that very young girls are routinely and criminally impregnated by adult men, and that clinics providing abortion care knowingly participate in covering up such crimes. On the basis of a phony "sting" operation perpetrated by Texas-based Life Dynamics International (LDI), Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline made adolescent puppy love a sex crime and spent years pursuing a fruitless prosecution of physicians and clinics in that state, an Ahab-like pursuit that culminated in his appointment of an Operation Rescue operative as a special prosecutor.

A woman impersonating a 13-year-old girl would call a clinic, ostensibly to schedule an abortion. The goal of the calls was to record the response of the clinic receptionist when told the girl on the line was 13 years old and that the man who had allegedly impregnated her was 22. Life Dynamics posted audio files and transcripts from the calls on the Web. ... The organization then claimed that the tapes proved that 91 percent of the clinics called didn't fulfill their legal obligation to report statutory rape....

[ from Medical Privacy? Have an Abortion and Kiss It Good-Bye ]

Like most states, Texas compiles statistics on induced terminations of pregnancy, and has done so for years.  The state's current abortion statistics report form already requires a woman's date of birth, her race or ethnicity, her marital status, her state and county of residence, her number of previous live births, her number of previous abortions, the type of abortion procedure she had, the date of her last menstrual period, and the length of gestation of her pregnancy.

For "family values" lawmakers such as Rep. Geanie Morrison and Sen. Florence Shapiro, that's just not enough personal information to pry out of a woman before she's allowed to have access to abortion care. Like all other anti-choice politicians, they keep coming back for more -- and this year, they intend to get it.

The "Abortion Reporting Requirement Act" -- introduced by Morrison in the house as HB 1750 and by Shapiro in the senate as SB 785 -- delves more intrusively into a woman's personal, medical and financial privacy than most well-meaning supporters of the 95-10 Initiative could imagine. Further, although it denies a woman access to abortion care unless she opens the details of her personal life to the state, none of the data mined by its provisions has much to do with reasons why a woman might have an abortion. But this legislation indeed might serve to reduce the overall number of abortions, if only by intimidating women forced to provide what should be confidential information to a state government deeply permeated [pdf link] by the influence of the Christian right.....

The abortion reporting form for each abortion must include:

:::

(14)  whether the abortion was paid for by:

                    (A)  private insurance;

                    (B)  a public health plan; or

                    (C)  personal payment by patient;

 (15)  whether insurance coverage was provided by:

                    (A)  a fee-for-service insurance company;

                    (B)  a managed care company; or

                    (C)  another source;

 (16)  the fee collected for performing or inducing the abortion; ...

In addition to knowing how much a woman paid for her abortion, to whom the fee was paid, and by what method, Florence and Geanie also want to know what town she lives in, the age of "the father of the unborn child," how her pregnancy was confirmed, who referred her to the doctor who performed her abortion, how much her fetus weighed after the procedure and -- only if she feels like telling, mind you -- why the woman was having an abortion in the first place. That information is the only entirely optional detail, which seems to render useless the ostensible purpose of such fact-finding missions as the "Abortion Reporting Requirement Act."

A woman needn't imagine that she can get on her high horse and refuse to answer any of the other questions. If she wants the state to let her have an abortion, she'll cooperate -- on the record.

Tagged as: reproductive, abortion, birth control, texas, horn, feminist, women, gop

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.