God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (23 page)

For all of Abbott’s initiatives, this session was dominated by Lieutenant Governor Patrick’s priorities, which included capping property tax increases and addressing matters such as hailstorm-lawsuit reform (according to the Insurance Council of Texas, homeowners suffered $5 billion in losses from hailstorms in 2016, the highest in the nation, resulting in half a million insurance claims). The heart of Patrick’s agenda consisted of the AM Texas platform of anti-abortion absolutism and hostility to same-sex marriage and undocumented workers. He proposed public subsidies—vouchers—for homeschooling and private school tuition. Despite the fact that a federal appeals court ruled in 2016 that the existing Texas voter ID law discriminates against minorities and the poor, Patrick sought to strengthen it. These bills would bend Texas further in the direction of the affluent and fortify the political strength of white evangelicals who feel threatened by rising minorities and changing social mores.

On March 29, 2017, in the middle of the legislative session, a welder named Jody Kuchler called the sheriff’s offices in Uvalde and Real Counties to say that a white truck was swerving all over a two-lane highway. “He’s going to hit someone head-on or he’s going to kill his own damn self,” Kuchler told the cops. He then watched helplessly as the truck rammed into a bus carrying members of the First Baptist Church of New Braunfels. Thirteen people on the bus were killed. The driver of the errant truck was twenty-year-old Jack Dillon Young, who had taken a cocktail of drugs. He was largely unhurt. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was texting,’ ” Kuchler told reporters. “I said, ‘Son, do you know what you just did?’ ”

That was just one of the accidents that might have been prevented if Rick Perry had signed the 2011 texting bill into law.

In that same session, the Republican state legislature turned its attention to defunding women’s health programs. “This is a war on birth control and abortions,” Wayne Christian, a state representative, Tea Party stalwart, and gospel singer, straightforwardly admitted. “That’s what family planning is supposed to be about.”

Texas has a long history with the abortion issue. In 1970, Norma McCorvey, under the name Jane Roe, brought suit against the legendary district attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade. McCorvey was a reform-school dropout who at the age of twenty-one was pregnant with her third child. At the time, abortion was prohibited in Texas unless the life of the mother was endangered. There were only six states in the country where abortion was legal. Two young Austin attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, took up the case, and in 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in
Roe v. Wade
, that the right to privacy under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment included a woman’s decision to seek an abortion. However, the court also specified that the state has an obligation to balance a woman’s right to choose against the protection of her health and the potential viability of her fetus.

The decision came too late for McCorvey, who had the baby and gave it up for adoption. McCorvey was working in an abortion clinic in Dallas when she suddenly had a conversion experience and decided that abortion was wrong. She subsequently joined the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, whose director, Flip Benham, baptized her in 1995 in a backyard swimming pool.

The long-term goals of cultural conservatives in Texas are to cut off access to abortion, end state subsidies for birth control, and gut state funding for Planned Parenthood—which, until 2011, served 60 percent of the health needs for low-income women in the state. The legislators slashed the family planning budget from $111.5 million to $37.9 million. Eighty-two family-planning clinics were shut down as a result. By defunding Planned Parenthood, the legislature incidentally blocked many women from getting cancer scans and other vital health treatments.

In March 2012, Rick Perry, who had just dropped out of his first presidential race, signed a bill requiring all women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram twenty-four hours before the procedure. Carol Alvarado, a Democratic representative from Houston, pointed out on the House floor that, for a woman who is less than eight to ten weeks pregnant, such a procedure would require a “transvaginal sonogram.” She actually displayed the required instrument to the discomfited lawmakers, a white plastic wand that resembled an elongated pistol, which would be inserted into the woman’s vagina—“government intrusion at its best,” she observed. Nonetheless, the bill passed, 107–42. “This is a great day for Texas,” Dan Patrick, then a state senator, declared. “This is a great day for women’s health.”

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation, and about 17 percent of Texan women and girls live in poverty. After the family-planning budget was cut, many women no longer had access to birth control, and there was a sharp rise in childbirths covered by Medicaid. Subsequently, maternal deaths in Texas have doubled, from 18.6 per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 35.8 in 2014—not only the worst in the nation but worse than the rate in countries such as Armenia, Egypt, and Romania; it’s more than twice the rate of maternal deaths in Lebanon. Those figures represent six hundred dead Texas women.

Researchers say it’s not entirely clear what accounts for the rise in maternal mortality, since the rate was already rising before the 2011 laws went into effect. Obesity, heart disease, drug overdoses, and lack of health insurance—all serious problems in the state—play a role. Misreporting may be a factor. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a two year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely,” an article in the September 2016 issue of
Obstetrics and Gynecology
reported.

The mystery might be cleared up if Governor Abbott would release records about the causes of death for these women. In 2011, when he was attorney general, he issued an opinion that information about the deceased would be withheld, supposedly to prevent fraud.

Fed up with the callous treatment of women, Jessica Farrar, a liberal state representative from Houston, filed House Bill 4260, the Man’s Right to Know Act, using the same patronizing “we’re doing this for your own good” language that characterizes the many bills directed at abortion and women’s health—for instance, requiring a sonogram and a rectal exam before prescribing Viagra. Then there’s this:

Children have also faced heartless treatment in Texas. In 2015, a federal judge, Janis Graham Jack, ruled that foster children “almost uniformly leave State custody more damaged than when they entered.” The state, she said, was violating the children’s constitutional rights by exposing them to unreasonable risks of harm. The judge declared that state oversight agencies adopted a policy of “deliberate indifference” toward the plight of the children in their care, even in the face of repeated abuse and, sometimes, homicide. “Rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm,” the judge stated.

Governor Abbott promised to overhaul the child-welfare system, but things have only gotten worse since he stepped in. In fiscal year 2016 alone, at least 200 children died of maltreatment in the state, compared with 173 the previous year, and that doesn’t include more than 100 other deaths that are still being investigated. Child Protective Services, the state unit charged with investigating cases of abuse, is in chaos. Nevertheless, Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the judge’s decision to appoint a special master to oversee the foster-care system because it would amount to a “federal takeover.”

Nearly a year after the judge’s ruling, an investigation by
The Dallas Morning News
found that as of September 2016, more than 4,700 children at high risk of abuse or severe neglect had not yet been contacted by state agencies. In the meantime, hundreds of children have been sleeping on air mattresses in hotels, emergency shelters, and even in government offices because the state has nowhere else to put them. Hundreds of caseworkers have also quit, complaining that they were overworked, demoralized, poorly paid, and often in danger. Union officials have said that higher pay would help attract more applicants to the job, which offers a starting salary of about $37,000 a year, but state officials countered with a plan to lower the educational requirements for caseworkers. During the 2017 legislative session, while bills addressing the child-welfare crisis were being considered, a teenage girl who was being housed in a state office building fled in the middle of the night. She was hit by a van and killed.

Despite this shameful record, Texas ranks in the middle of various measures of child-welfare systems, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability, ahead of New York, California, and Massachusetts, which is the worst.