If ever there was proof that anti-abortion laws are more about controlling women’s bodies and lives than about the “sanctity of life,” this Texas Tribune report on Abilene prison officer Salia Issa, seven months pregnant and denied permission to go to the hospital after she began suffering labor pains, should do it.
Eventually, two and a half hours after the pain started, the expectant mother said she was allowed to leave the Middleton Unit. As quickly as the pain would allow her, Issa drove to a nearby hospital, where doctors rushed her into emergency surgery after being unable to find a fetal heartbeat. The baby was delivered stillborn.
If Issa had gotten to the hospital sooner, medical personnel told her, the baby would have survived, the lawsuit claims.
Nearly a year later, Issa and her husband, Fiston Rukengeza, on behalf of themselves and their unborn child, sued TDCJ [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] and three of Issa’s supervisors — Brandy Hooper, Desmond Thompson and Alonzo Hammond. They argue the state caused the death of their child by violating state and federal laws as well as the U.S. Constitution, and they are seeking money to cover medical costs and funeral expenses and to compensate for pain and suffering.
Yet, the same state that enacted laws allowing criminal charges against anyone who “furnishes the means” for an abortion, and bounties for private citizens suing anyone they suspect of aiding and abetting an abortion (since ruled unconstitutional), contends Issa’s unborn child did not suffer a loss of life.
More from The Tribune:
“Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the Fourteenth Amendment does the same,” the Texas attorney general’s office wrote in a March footnote, referring to the constitutional right to life.
For more than two decades, in legislation passed by lawmakers and defended in court by the attorney general’s office, Texas has insisted “unborn children” be recognized as people starting at fertilization. And although it has traditionally referred to all stages of pregnancy, from fertilized egg to birth, as an unborn child, the state repeatedly referred to Issa’s stillborn baby as a fetus in legal briefings.
It’s a stark shift in tone from the state’s self-proclaimed status as “a nationwide leader in the protection of the unborn” in the anti-abortion fight. A few months after Issa lost her unborn child, now-suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a press release that he would “continue to fight tirelessly for the rights of the unborn.” Paxton had not yet been impeached and was still at the helm of the agency when the state’s motions in Issa’s case were filed.
The Tribune explains that the state's chief but not sole legal argument is that Issa’s stillbirth happened before the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. Whatever the reasoning, it sure contradicts the claims that harsh criminalization of abortion is about protecting the life of an “unborn child.”
Or maybe Paxton and his Texas buddies think some lives are worth more than others. Did I mention that Issa is a woman of color?
