The Republican Party of Texas is considering a platform that appears to endorse the death penalty for abortion providers and patients.
Texas delegates voted on a 2024 platform at the state’s GOP Convention on Saturday and aim to tally the votes by Wednesday to finalize their platform for the coming year. The proposal called for new legislation to solidify fetal personhood ideology into law, define abortion care as homicide and criminalize in vitro fertilization, first reported by feminist writer Jessica Valenti.
The 50-page document also includes a slew of other far-right ideas such as proclaiming that gender-affirming care is “child abuse,” requirements that Christianity and the Bible be taught in public schools, and clarifies that Texas “retains the right to secede from the United States.”
The platform is seen as more of a wish list than a binding document, but it’s a critical reflection of how far right the Texas Republican Party has moved in recent years.
The GOP platform calls for an “equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization,” and later states that “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide.” The phrase “equal protection of the law” is used in the anti-choice movement to define abortion as homicide, and criminalizes abortion physicians and patients as murderers.
The Republican Party of Texas did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Texas has executed more people than any other state. Although the platform language doesn’t require that Texas treat abortion as capital murder ― the only offense that’s punishable by the death penalty in the state ― Texas law currently treats the murder of a child younger than 15 as a capital offense.
“The state of Texas is a leader in controlling people with their penal system,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at Lawyering for Reproductive Justice: If/When/How. “If a fetus is considered a person, then it’s…
Read the full article here
