Texas law sides with pregnancies, not pregnant women
In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to an abortion prior to the fetus’s viability. This month, the Supreme Court imposed patrimony on all women by refusing 5-4 to block the fundamentalist Texas abortion law.
This law deputizes vigilantes to earn a $10,000 bounty by suing anyone who “aids or abets” a woman to obtain an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Many women don’t realize they’re pregnant until after six weeks. There are no exceptions for rape, sexual abuse or incest.
This law will not affect wealthy women who can go elsewhere. The danger is for poor white, Black and brown women, rural women, and young women who have no financial resources to obtain a safe and legal abortion. It effectively codifies and enforces pregnancy.
To paraphrase a famous poem during Nazi rule: “First they came for immigrants. Then they came for people of color. Then they came for voting rights. Now they’ve come for women.”
KATHLEEN COLLOMB, DECATUR
Plan to improve health care access smacks of welfare expansion
Re: “How to improve health care access” (Insights, Sept. 3), David Schaefer’s suggestion for improving health care access is a rehash of previous requests for welfare expansion. It’s always the same: more funds from the federals to the states for more Medicaid coverage if only the states would agree. Where do people like Schaefer think the funds originate? Do they think money grows on trees? No, it doesn’t. It comes from the pockets of taxpayers who support all the other welfare programs. Schaefer is endorsing Biden’s promise to eliminate inequity through the redistribution of wealth. Schaefer’s remedy is not new; it’s as old as the Democratic Party, the same party that supported Jim Crow and the KKK.
Schaefer doesn’t have insight - his record is stuck on welfare expansion that increases dependency.
JACK FRANKLIN, CONYERS
