By Nolan D. McCaskill
https://www.dallasnews.com
AUSTIN — U.S. Rep. Colin Allred marked the two-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade with a Monday news conference at a women’s health center that downsized after Texas banned abortions.
The Democrat’s opponent in the November election, Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, didn’t mention the milestone ruling that rejected a constitutional right to abortion, leaving its legality to each state to decide.
The difference highlighted the two major parties’ approaches to abortion, particularly for Democrats, who have seized on the issue since the 2022 ruling, winning ballot measures to protect access to abortion in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky.
While the removal of a federal right that had been in effect for nearly 50 years has energized Democrats who vow to one day restore it, Republicans would rather talk about issues such as immigration, border security, inflation and the economy.
Nationally, Democrats hope their position on abortion can help President Joe Biden win another term in the White House while netting their party enough congressional seats to control the House of Representatives and retain their slim majority in the Senate.
“I think Ted Cruz is probably going to do three to five podcasts this week,” said Allred, who represents Dallas in Congress. “If that holds true, let’s see if he discusses this during one of his podcasts. I know that when Texas women have come to his committee in the United States Senate to testify, he has refused to be there to hear them out. … He wouldn’t hear them those days, but he will on Nov. 5.”
Cruz initially celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision with a statement calling it “nothing short of a massive victory for life.”
At a Senate committee hearing before Roe was undone, the Texas Republican described the state’s trigger law — enacted in 2021 to create a near-total ban on abortion in case Roe was overturned — as “perfectly reasonable.” In those remarks from September 2021, he also cast Democrats as “radical and extreme” on abortion.
On June 12, Cruz did not attend a subcommittee hearing at which a Dallas woman testified that she had to leave the state for a medically necessary abortion after an ultrasound showed one of her twins had serious abnormalities.
On Monday, Cruz had nothing to say on abortion. In several posts on social media platform X, Cruz promoted his legislation to eliminate taxes on tips, ripped Biden’s “open border policies,” shared clips of his podcast and criticized a federal judicial nominee.
The decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization initiated a 30-day countdown to Texas’ trigger law enacting an abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest in 2022.
The Texas Supreme Court took up a legal challenge from a group of women whose doctors declined to perform abortions after the patients experienced pregnancy complications, citing Texas’ abortion ban and uncertainty about the exception for pregnancies that threaten the health or life of the mother. The Texas Medical Board adopted rules Friday clarifying exceptions to the abortion ban.
Taylor Edwards, a plaintiff in that state Supreme Court case Zurawski vs. Texas, joined Allred at the Austin news conference, as did the candidate’s wife, Alexandra Eber; Kristian Carranza, a Democratic state House candidate; and former state Sen. Wendy Davis, a Democrat who famously filibustered abortion restrictions in the state Senate before unsuccessfully challenging Greg Abbott in the 2014 gubernatorial election.
“We have been criminalized by extreme politicians like Ted Cruz,” Edwards told reporters, adding she was “terrified” of being prosecuted when she returned to Texas after getting an abortion. “I am not a criminal. I am a mother who made the best decision she could out of love for her baby, who was terminally ill.”
Allred said other health care policies under attack include interstate travel for abortion access, in vitro fertilization treatments and the right to contraception. Cruz introduced a bill to protect access to IVF services, which Allred framed as a “cynical” election-year move to “cover up” his past positions.
“This is like the burglar coming to your house and trying to sell you new locks,” he said. “We are here talking about IVF needing protection because of his attacks on it. IVF didn’t need protecting before Ted Cruz had his way.”
Allred trails Cruz in a University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll released last week. In that survey, Cruz leads Allred, 45% to 34%, with 14% of respondents undecided.
Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the anniversary in a rare statement from a statewide official addressing the abortion ruling. Paxton, who has instituted a “Sanctity of Life Day” in the attorney general’s office to remember and celebrate the Dobbs ruling, warned “the work is far from completed.”
“The Biden Administration continues to use unlawful agency regulations and other levers of power to force states to institute its radical abortion agenda even when it violates state laws,” Paxton said. “I will never stop defending the sanctity of life against these unconstitutional attempts to undermine Texas’s life-affirming laws.”
The Texas Republican Party called June 24, 2022, “a historic day for the pro-life movement,” noting that “advocates worked for a generation to reverse one of the most unjust, damaging, and plainly incorrect judicial decisions in our nation’s history.”
“Texas must be the most pro-life State in America,” the party said. “The mainstream media won’t report on Texas’s pro-life, pro-pregnancy culture, but the Texas GOP will champion our policies and advocate for our pro-life platform policies to be prioritized next session.”
This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas.
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