Abortion legislation gets green light from Senate

Texas Senators passed Bill 16 on a margin of 21-10. This bill, as some may recall, requires doctors to perform a sonogram two hours before allowing a pregnant woman to have an abortion.

During said sonogram, doctors are legally required to describe the physical attributes of the fetus to the woman and give her alternatives to terminating her pregnancy.

It was only a month ago that Gov. Rick Perry proposed this senseless bit of legislation; however, it received much criticism because it required the sonogram to be performed 24 hours before a woman went through with having an abortion.

What’s disconcerting about this is how a piece of legislation so mindless could pass with a majority vote — and with tighter constraints. In the course of a month, the proposed preventative measures for which it was initially criticized for have grown narrower and crueller.

We don’t understand how the Texas Senate could swing the majority vote in the first place — though using the right words and employing biblical references in a pro-life debate to strike the pathos of the rest of the party certainly helps.

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. He knows all of us,” Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Texas, said, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The biggest concern we have is that, in the middle of a multi-billion dollar budget crisis, the state Senate has passed a bill that requires even more tax dollars to sustain.

Furthermore, forcing a pregnant woman to be subject to trauma for a decision that is entirely her own is an extreme form of government intervention.

Whether people agree with abortion or not, leaving someone with no option but turning over control of her body and using cruelty to push a conservative agenda is an abomination of human rights.

If lawmakers have been successful in this not-so-noble endeavor, one can only wonder which rights they’ll be able to steal from you next.

The government has far overstepped its boundaries in passing this piece of legislation. In fact, Bill 16 exactly the opposite of what the doctor ordered.