Wendy Davis rose to national fame filibustering a reasonable bill that bans abortion after 20 weeks in Texas. That filibuster may have handed Davis the Texas Democrats’ nomination for governor, but it came at a cost: Davis lost several key Hispanic counties in the Democratic primary, to a candidate who raised $0 and didn’t really campaign. The issue that cost Davis those counties: her abortion filibuster.
Davis’ 2013 filibuster put Texas in the spotlight, and her radical allies disrupted the normal political process. Davis did nothing to stop any of their extreme antics.
This week, Democrats of a more sensible bent in West Virginia enacted a law similar to the one that Davis unsuccessfully filibustered.
West Virginia over the weekend became the first Democrat-controlled state to pass a ban on abortions 20 weeks after conception, on the basis that fetuses can feel pain.
The state’s Democrat-led House the House passed the bill 85-15, according to the Associated Press. The Senate had previously passed the bill 25 to 9, according to the Herald Dispatch. In 2010, a total of 27 pregnancies in West Virginia were aborted at or after 18 weeks of gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control. (Gestational age there is based on a clinician’s estimate.)
Ten other states have passed similar bans based on the theory that fetuses can feel pain starting 20 weeks after fertilization. They are: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas. Each ban was passed by a Republican-led state legislature, making West Virginia the first state to do so under Democratic leadership.
Banning abortion after 20 weeks is a big majority issue — about 64% of Americans support such bans.
Maybe that’s why Davis tries to trick Texans that she’s somehow not only not an abortion extremist, which she is, but that she is somehow “pro-life.”
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