Texas Republicans have planned your future and you're not going to like it.

Especially if you're a woman.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs anti-abortion law guarded by armed Texas men.

The right-wing loon dream machine pushed a button at midnight, and BAM      !  The calendar turned September 1 and the future the Republican Party is planning for the whole country is here!  And what a future it is!

How about this:  women were effectively stripped of the right to abortion that has been guaranteed since 1973 by Roe v Wade.  That’s right.  No more abortions in Texas after the 6th week of a woman’s pregnancy. 

Let’s stop right here and consider what the state of Texas just did.  The Supreme Court, in a decision that went 7-2, decided back in 1973 that under the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, all American women had a right to privacy that protects a woman’s decision, in consultation behind closed doors with her doctor, whether or not to end a pregnancy.  There were limitations imposed by the court.  During the first trimester of a pregnancy, no laws could prohibit a woman from deciding to get an abortion.  During the second trimester, states could impose reasonable heath regulations on abortions, and during the third trimester, when a fetus becomes fully viable, abortions could be banned entirely so long as states made an exception for cases where the health and life of the mother was in jeopardy.

The operative word in the Roe v Wade decision was and is “privacy.”  The court recognized, in effect, that just as men have the right to go into a room with a doctor and decide to terminate their ability to impregnate a woman by performing a vasectomy on them without having to consult the state or anyone else, women have the right to decide with a doctor to have their pregnancies terminated without interference by the state or any person, including a husband or the man who got them pregnant.

Makes sense doesn’t it?  If you hold that one group of citizens has a right to make private medical decisions concerning their bodies, you should protect the same right of other citizens to make the same kind of private decisions about their bodies. 

Republicans and the right-wing and fundamentalist Christians have been after this right of privacy pretty much ever since Roe v Wade became law.  But the only people whose right to privacy they have been interested in are women.  Not men.  Nope, men have been free and are free to continue making whatever medical decisions they want about their bodies.  Hell, men are free to go into an operating room and have a doctor remove their testicles as well as their penises if they so desire.  The state has no right to stop them.

But in Texas, as of midnight last night, women no longer have the right to make a decision with their doctors to end their pregnancies after the 6th week.  You’ve read that most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at that time, which is the point.  How can a woman decide to have an abortion if she doesn’t know she is carrying a fetus?  She can’t. 

Pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood and the people who support women’s rights to abortion have called the Texas law a backdoor way to effectively end the rights women were granted under Roe v Wade, and they’re exactly right. 

But of course Texas didn’t stop with the six week rule about abortions.  No, they went further and established an entirely new enforcement regimen for the law.  The Texas law allows any person to sue anyone involved in providing an abortion for a woman after the six week period, to include anyone helping to pay for the abortion, anyone “facilitating” the prohibited abortion including someone who drove the woman to the clinic, or even anyone providing information about getting an abortion to the woman.  There are no restrictions on who can sue.  Random people who do not even know the woman can sue, including people out of state. 

The law is thought by many experts to even allow a rapist to sue, although it is unclear whether a man must be convicted of rape in order to be banned from suing.  Which is of course a moot point, because no man who rapes a woman and gets her pregnant is going to be charged, tried and convicted within the first six weeks of her pregnancy.  So it apparently remains possible that a rapist may sue his victim and anyone helping her if she gets an abortion after the six week period.

The law provides for an award of $10,000 to anyone successfully suing under its provisions, which experts believe will open up a chaotic flood of lawsuits intended to achieve material gain from the pregnancies of women. 

The law is silent on how, or who, or by what means it would be determined whether a woman has reached her sixth week of pregnancy.  What would be the standard of proof?  A blood test?  A sonogram?  If so, who would be allowed to order such a test?  Who would be empowered to demand and/or receive the results?  In other words, what is to be the proof under the law that a woman is past her 6th week of pregnancy?  If the state is to have no role in enforcing the law, who is?  Random people filing lawsuits? 

The law is on its face an absurd exercise in fascist control of women, but who is to say it won’t survive court challenges, especially given the make-up of the current arch-conservative Supreme Court?  I think the court refused to intervene last night in an emergency appeal for a stay to stop enforcement of the law because the conservative justices don’t know what equally absurd reading of the law they would have to use to uphold the law. 

They may not need such a rationale, however.  They could uphold Mississippi’s outright ban on abortion, thus completely overturning Roe v Wade, and that would effectively bring to an end the entire “right to privacy” found by the Supreme Court in 1973 under the Due Process Clause.

Because who needs “due process” anyway when it comes to women, right?  Texas doesn’t recognize it, so neither should the rest of the country, according to the Republican Party. 

Oooops…almost forgot.  While Texas Republicans were busy stripping women of their rights to privacy, they also made it about ten times harder to vote in the state, and they passed a law that went into effect today allowing any vertical yahoo who isn’t a felon to carry a gun without a permit.  That’s right, you can walk around carrying a gun in the state of Texas without a safety course, without training in use of the gun, without any local check by authorities into your background at all.  Nobody in the state of Texas can prevent you from carrying a gun, which means you can buy a gun without a background check at a gun show and legally carry it without further ado.  Nice, huh?  It’s like open season for gun loons in the state of Texas today, and fuck you if one of them uses the gun to hold you up and take your wallet, or even accidentally discharges it in the aisle of a Walmart and wounds you, because, you know…another “freedom” guaranteed to you by the Texas Republican Party, along with the “freedom” to walk around unmasked and infect anybody you come into contact with. 

That’s the future Texas wants for you, folks, and they’re even taking care to make sure you will have a hell of a time trying to vote against the lunatics who passed these laws, because you know whose “freedom” is important, don’t you? Texas Republican men, that’s who.