FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT
Tom Hargis, Director of Communications, ACLU of Texas, 832.291.4776, [email protected]
Austin – Less than 24 hours after State Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster helped deliver a near-final blow to a controversial anti-abortion bill, Governor Perry called the Texas legislature back into session beginning July 1, resurrecting SB5 and angering advocates for women’s health. The proposed legislation would ban abortions after 20 weeks, place medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers, and close nearly all abortion clinics in Texas.
“Electoral ambitions and partisan politics continue to serve as the only motivations for Rick Perry and David Dewhurst, not the welfare and concerns of the majority of Texans,” said Terri Burke, executive director for the ACLU of Texas. “These men will go to any extreme to get what they want. After failing to ram through legislation that panders to the extremes and strips women’s reproductive rights, they simply want a do-over; thousands of women and poor harmed by this legislation won’t get that same opportunity. That’s the real tragedy. ”
Last week, a bipartisan poll showed that the majority of Texans oppose the anti-abortion legislation. A link to the poll may be found here.
