Commentary: Texas has always been tough on women. It's worse now.


Joyce Winslow
Sun, August 21, 2022 

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights considers any nation’s abortion law that excludes rape a form of torture because it denies victims closure and healing. Texas now exerts that torture on women, its 61 percent male legislature blind to the astonishing number of rapes here. You might expect a high-population state to have more rapes, but when figured per 100,000 citizens, Texas still ranks high with 13,000 forcible rapes in 2020, according to the Texas Department of Safety. Most victims were white, college-educated women whose trust of a so-called friend or acquaintance was brutally betrayed.

A 2015 deep dive report by the Statewide Sexual Assault Prevalence Study found that women waited many days to report the crime to police because they thought “nothing would happen to the rapist. ” They were right. In 2019, even after rape laws were tightened, just half of reported cases were prosecuted and only half of those resulted in jail time. Police figure only ten percent of rapes gets reported.

That puts into stark perspective Governor Greg Abbott’s claim to “work tirelessly to make sure we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them.” How will he find the bad guys if women rightly figure it’s futile to name them? How do any of us believe Abbott’s promise of “aggression” after 376 police loitered 77 minutes in Uvalde while children were being slaughtered?

Texas' heinous abortion law is but one of many sexist laws echoing through state history. In 1870 the state legislature raised the legal age of sexual consent from 7 to 10 -- long after 32 other states set the bar at 16. Current Romeo and Juliet Laws still protect a 17-year-old boy who impregnates a girl three years younger. It’s on her to prove she did not say “yes.”

Texas legislators have also turned a blind eye to domestic violence. The Sexual Assault Study noted that an unwanted pregnancy keeps an abused woman in place, dependent on her husband’s livelihood to support the child. Abortion had provided an exit ramp. That escape route now gone, the grit is just grittier.

Think children of rape grow up happy? The NIH found that a third of them commit suicide before they turn 12; they too became victims of abuse.

This kind of tragedy has a price tag-- $340 annually for every Texan shouldering rising health care costs for rape victims.These victims often suffer long-term depression and many of their babies are born with syphilis. In 2015 the annual health care expenditure for Texas rape victims topped $42.8 million. How much higher will that figure go with the strictest abortion law in the country?

And how many women will suffer gravely from the latest salvo fired by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton? He challenges the federal Health and Human Services (HHS) directive that requires hospitals provide abortions in medical emergencies like pre-eclampsia. Eclampsia killed Lady Sybil Branson on the fictitious TV series Downton Abbey, but that cause of death remains a threat in real life, often preventable by abortion. Paxton hyperventilates that the HHS directive “would transform every emergency room into a walk-in abortion clinic.” If he prevails in federal court, some babies Paxton would keep in severely damaged wombs will grow up without their mothers; physicians who might have saved them had to stand down.

A 1918 law decreed all Texans could vote except “idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane, and women." Come November women need to take the reins and vote out Abbott and his ilk. That alone could lift Texas by its bootstraps.

Winslow served as a spokesperson for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the George W. Bush administration.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Commentary: Texas has always been tough on women. It's worse now.