- Leonard Pitts Jr., Tribune Content Agency
- Apr 13, 2022
- 1
Last week, Texas gave us a glimpse of the future. It was not pretty.
It seems that a week ago today, a 26-year-old woman was arrested and charged with murder. Specifically, according to a statement from the Sheriff’s Department in tiny Starr County on the Mexican border, Lizelle Herrera “intentionally and knowingly” caused “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”
Thankfully, her ordeal was not long-lived. On Monday, the district attorney asked a judge to dismiss the charge. Although Texas is among the states that have imposed harsh limits on a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy, it has no statute covering what Herrera is alleged to have done. In fact, Texas law specifically prohibits criminal prosecution of a woman who has an abortion.
One wishes that offered more solace than it does. To the contrary, it seems reasonable to suspect Herrera’s arrest will someday go down as a harbinger, foreshadowing the achievement of a goal toward which the so-called “pro-life” movement has been driving for almost half a century: a world where abortion is a criminal offense.
They consistently claim otherwise, but their own logic contradicts them. If a fertilized egg is, as they contend, a human being, then killing a fertilized egg is murder. If killing a fertilized egg is murder, then those who facilitate the act are murderers. And murderers belong in jail. Their logic goes off the track, of course, with that first assumption, the moment you challenge yourself to run into a burning house or jump into a flooded river to save a fertilized egg the way you would to save a human being.
