Texas Governor Rick Perry signed off on a bill Tuesday that would ban abortions past 20 weeks, checking off another item on his list for his radical anti-abortion campaign. The Preborn Pain Bill, which was introduced and lobbied to the Texas government by state Sen. Glenn Hegar and Rep. Jodie Laudenberg, was proposed to eliminate the pain a baby supposedly suffers during an abortion after 20 weeks.
“The state has a responsibility to prevent the needless suffering of our most vulnerable citizens, and these bills introduced by Sen. Hegar and Rep. Laudenberg are a vital step toward meeting that obligation,” Perry said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Texas has done a great deal of work over the last several years to nurture our culture of life, and we will continue to do everything we can to protect the lives of the unborn, until abortion is finally a thing of the past,” he adds in his promise to the state of Texas.
Perry has been onboard with the bill since its proposal and even offered his stamp of approval at a Texas Right to Life event in December, where the bill was first introduced. At the event, Perry said that an abortion at or after 20 weeks is “the point a baby can feel the pain of being killed.”
Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Nebraska have all jumped on the bandwagon by passing similar laws banning 20-week abortions. Those opposing the 20-week abortion bans, including The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, point fingers at the lawmakers’ display of hypocrisy by referring back to the contradicting Roe v. Wade case, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a women’s right to an abortion up until the fetus is fully developed and able to live outside the womb, which the Roe court decided was about 27 weeks.
Krysta Loera is writer and researcher with Ring of Fire.
