Letica Van de Putte is a State Senator representing San Antonio. She is chair of the Veteran Affairs and Military Installations Committee in the State Senate.
In this op-ed to the Houston Chronicle on 26 June 2013 she explains why she said what she said on Tuesday night during Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster of SB 5.
As most people know, I rushed back to the Capitol on Tuesday night after saying a final goodbye to my daddy. When I returned to the Senate floor, it didn't feel like the Senate I had left last Friday. There was an energy that is hard to explain - part tension and part excitement. While you could cut the tension on the floor with a knife, the excitement coming from the gallery and the rotunda almost masked the anxiety my colleagues were emitting. The entire gallery was filled with our constituents, and they were watching politely and attentively trying to follow parliamentary procedures that it takes years for most to understand.
Their disdain for Senate Bill 5 was much like mine, and they were there to say that they would never surrender their reproductive rights without taking a stand. They were "standing with Wendy" (Fort Worth Sen. Wendy Davis, who was attempting a 13-hour filibuster of the bill), and I was going to stand with her, too.
I believe that women throughout our state believe they've gained too much to give it back now.
Unfortunately, some of my Senate colleagues do not believe in trusting women with their reproductive organs. It's amazing to me that they do not trust women with a choice, but they trust them with a child.
I was horrified when I learned that SB 5 potentially could leave the state with only five abortion clinics, and they were all in major metropolitan areas.
I thought, "What is going to happen when a woman working two jobs out in West Texas finds out she is pregnant?" Maybe her pregnancy was an accident. Maybe she was raped. Whatever the reason, she is scared and desperate to terminate her pregnancy. And she has a legal right to do it.
But whether she would be able to exercise this right was another question.
Had SB 5 passed, this woman would have had to take time off from work and drive hours to find one of the five clinics to perform her abortion. Once she found a clinic, she would have to obtain a sonogram and wait 24 hours to obtain her abortion. This young woman would then take a pill at the clinic, wait 48 additional hours and then come back to the clinic to take an additional pill. This young woman has been away from her home and her job for at least four days. That's no small matter in any instance, but it makes it impossible if she doesn't have the monetary means to leave her job for an extended period of time.
I don't see how limiting access and choice is anything more than hardship and harassment, especially to the poor.
We advocates of reproductive choices often say that we want to make abortion safe, legal and rare. While those who push anti-choice legislation will likely never agree with us on the "legal" part, I think we can agree on the other two. But the "rare" part cannot come from making abortion inaccessible. It needs to come from making it unnecessary.
That can happen through better health care. If the state is truly concerned with women's and children's health, why do we cut women off from Medicaid 60 days post-partum?
So yesterday, I stood with Wendy while she filibustered a bill that would cut access to women's health care. And while the lieutenant governor may believe that his constituents who were in their Capitol were an "unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics," I believe that these Texans were only using their voices to be heard after days of being shut off. They were venting their anger after seeing the rules of the Senate cast aside by the Republican leadership, as well as possible violations of state law.
They were taking a stand for a constitutionally protected right, and I encourage them to never sit down.
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