The news has been making the rounds: Wendy Davis actually does support a late-term abortion ban. Wait, what? Wasn’t it a drawn-out filibuster against a 5-month abortion ban that raised Davis to the national stage and poised her for her subsequent gubernatorial bid in Texas? Davis claimed that her issue with Texas’ 5-month abortion ban, care of HB2, revolved around a lack of “deference between a woman and her doctor…” in the bill’s language. Here’s what she told the Dallas Morning News:
My concern, even in the way the 20-week ban was written in this particular bill, was that it didn’t give enough deference between a woman and her doctor making this difficult decision, and instead tried to legislatively define what it was. I would have and could have voted to allow that to go through, if I felt like we had tightly defined the ability for a woman and a doctor to be making this decision together and not have the Legislature get too deep in the weeds of how we would describe when that was appropriate.
If that quote didn’t make a lot of sense to you, don’t worry; you’re not alone. Here’s the bottom line: abortions at or beyond 5-months of pregnancy were absolutely wonderful to Wendy Davis circa July, 2013. Then came the gubernatorial bid, and suddenly a 5-month abortion ban is not out of the question. Liberal media are claiming that this reversal is not inconsistent, but as we all know, the only sound evidence of a politician’s true stance on an issue is his or her voting record. And Wendy Davis’ legislative history does not affirm her current claim that she would support a 5-month abortion ban in the future.
In fact, Wendy Davis did seek to amend HB2, but not for the reasons she cited to the Dallas Morning News. In reality, the simple fix of changing HB2’s language in regards to the legislature’s involvement in the discussion between “a woman and her doctor” is nowhere to be found in Davis’ amendments to the bill. Rather, the amendments deal with funding of the Women’s Health Program(which was pointless), and the second pertained to the rate of uninsured Texans– again, completely unrelated to the language issues Davis supposedly had with the bill. Davis implies that she would have been fine with the passage of HB2 given lingual tweaks, but her record clearly demonstrates otherwise.
Wendy Davis proved two things when she flip-flopped on her late-term abortion stance. First, she proved that she is willing to do anything to gain the governor’s mansion, including lie. Second, she proved that she has a very low opinion of Texas voters’ ability to pick up on her lies and backhanded political strategies.