81st Legislative Session Wrap-Up (June 2009)By Blake Rocap, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas Legislative Counsel
Another legislative session has come and gone, leaving Texans feeling as though they have been in a minor car accident and need to check in to make sure everything is okay. I'm happy to share that in the area of reproductive rights we have escaped without anti-choice elected officials adding any new restrictions to access to abortion care or additional burdensome requirements imposed upon the courageous providers in our state.
There were two anti-choice bills that loomed large as they made their way through the process during the legislative session. The first, by Sen. Dan Patrick and Rep. Frank Corte, would have required women to undergo -- and view -- an ultrasound prior to having an abortion. Additionally, it would have imposed more requirements on doctors and clinic staff while at the same time dictating the practice of medicine and interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. NARAL Pro-Choice Texas worked in concert with abortion providers and our other allies in the medical community to form a bipartisan coalition of senators that forced Sen. Patrick to relent on the uncompromising language of his original bill before it would be voted out of the Senate.
The second piece of anti-choice legislation was a Targeted Restriction on Abortion Providers -- or TRAP -- bill. This proposal would have required any physician who performed an abortion to report private information about the patient and procedure to the state. While this bill passed the House State Affairs committee, we were again able to find just enough votes in the Senate to block it.
A bad piece of legislation that got more attention and chances than it deserved was the bill to create a "Choose Life" specialty plate. The funds generated from sales of this plate would have gone to unlicensed, unregulated crisis pregnancy centers that provide no medical services but instead masquerade as clinics and provide coercive counseling against choosing to terminate a pregnancy. Prior to the beginning of the legislative session, in what was widely regarded as political pandering, Gov. Perry held a press conference to announce his support for the bill... and why not? The anti-choice movement that makes up his support base loves this bill because it provides them with funding to continue to support anti-choice politicians.
This bill has been filed six times, and requests through the Texas Department of Transportation to create the bill have also been denied. This was the bill that came closest to passing, as it was resurrected several times through various procedural machinations. Sen. Carona authored the bill; it was referred to the Senate transportation committee, which he chairs, but our allies on the committee let him know that they had the votes to keep the bill from moving through the process. So he had it re-referred to a friendlier committee. It was amended on two other transportation-related bills, including the TXDOT sunset bill through which it almost passed into law, but in a nice bit of irony Sen. Carona killed that bill by threatening a filibuster because his local option gas tax provision was not included in the final version.
Once again, this session we had to know the process and the rules better and work harder because the anti-choice majority controls the leadership positions and outnumbers the pro-choice legislators. There is no greater example of this than the budget process. At the beginning of the session, Health & Human Services Commission had requested an additional three million dollars for the funding of crisis pregnancy centers. Neither the House Appropriations Committee nor the Senate Finance Committee agreed to provide this extra funding and neither chamber passed this funding when the budget was originally debated. However, in the conference committee on the budget -- in which leaders from each chamber are supposed to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of bills -- the anti-choice members again provided more funding for this controversial and wasteful program.
In addition to stopping all of the bad bills we did see a few successes. The reimbursement rate for oral contraception from the State to clinics and doctors that serve low-income women went up, which should help more women who need access to health care. We worked on many pieces of legislation that would have had a positive impact on women's health and our communities and state, including greater access to contraception and EC for survivors of sexual assault, medically accurate sex education, a bill to stop the state from linking abortion to breast cancer in its mandatory materials, and multiple bills that tried in one way or another to prevent unplanned pregnancies and reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy. While none of these bills passed, many received hearings and there was a more productive conversation on these issues than there had been last session, during which most of these bills were not heard in committee.
The only way we are going to have more successful legislative sessions is to take back the political power in the legislature! So please continue to stay involved in your communities and help us elect more pro-choice candidates so we can improve reproductive health across all of Texas.
On February 12, the big news from the legislature was the announcement of committee assignments for the Texas House. Although the anti-choice majority shrank in November with the election of several new representatives, including NARAL Pro-Choice Texas-endorsed Kristi Thibaut and Diana Maldonado, the threat to womens' health through irresponsible budgeting and attempts to deny women access to safe and legal abortion through overregulation and intimidation will continue.
Committee assignments and chairmanships have a great impact on the legislation that will be debated by the full House. Commitee chairs have the discretion to hear or not hear any bill referred to their committee. This is important because every bill must have a committee hearing and be approved by a majority of committee members before it can proceed to the full house for debate and possibly become law.
Below, you will find a list of the committees which are likely to have an impact on women's health legislation in 2009, as well as their members' scores on matters of reproductive choice (taken from our
2007 Legislative Scorecard). As you can see by the scores of these committees, and with anti-choice members as chairmen controlling what bills receive hearings, it looks like another difficult session for women's health in Texas.
