WHO IS EDDIE LUCIO TO PREACH TO POOR WOMEN ABOUT MORALS?

By Juan Montoya

The way Eddie Lucio talks about his support for the conservatives restrictive House Bill 2 that has passed to the Texas Senate he wants to provide safer, better reproductive services for the women of Texas.

Yet, he well knows that if it passes – and that is all but a certainty it will pass in the Texas Senate – no clinics providing abortion services will be available to any woman in the Rio Grande Valley.

That means that a woman who decides she doesn't want to carry out her pregnancy to term will have to travel to San Antonio or out of state to have an abortion performed. Poor women, who can;t afford the travel, lodgin, or costs associate with the procedure will be deprived of a choice in the matter. Eddie will make it for them because, well, he knows better than they do when it comes to their bodies.

It matters little that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade of 1973 grants abortion as a constitutional right to all women in this country.

Lucio and the rest of the male-dominated crew over at the Lege have been hell-bent on deciding for them whether they want to have children or not.

As Mara Posada, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of South Texas, said: “We do believe these laws are mainly being passed to restrict access,” she said. “If they cannot make abortion illegal, they will make it impossible for women to get them.”

The bill prohibits abortions of fetuses more than 20 weeks post-fertilization, a change from the current 24-week restriction, requires physicians at abortion centers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the center, and mandates that those centers be held to the same standards of ambulatory surgical centers.

That, said Whole Woman’s Health spokeswoman Fatimah Gifford, poses the most threat to women’s health. The bill would lead to the cessation of abortion services at her company’s clinic in McAllen.

Lucio told the local daily that as an anti-abortion legislator it is his goal to limit abortions.

“If we limit those abortion services, then hopefully we will see more babies being born, and I think they have the right to be born,” he said.

Those new restrictions come on the heels of the 2003 bill that required abortions performed after 16 weeks to be performed in a hospital or ambulatory surgical center, that women seeking abortion be required to wait 24 hours after receiving information about adoption agencies and lowered the number of abortions that could be performed by an unlicensed abortion provider.

Another law that went into effect in 2012 that requires a 24-hour delay after a state-mandated ultrasound already makes an abortion a multi-day process,adding the additional costs of lodging and travel to make abortions even more expensive.
“We would hope that women understand that there are other alternatives,” he said, noting that there are adoption options and centers that take in pregnant women who have issues with their families after revealing their pregnancy. “There are a lot of care-giving types of facilities that would gladly help young women who obviously did not want to get pregnant but are pregnant.”

Lucio obviously wants Valley women to have more babies, even if they are the products of  rape and incest. He thinks the world as Eddie has made it is a fine place for a new human being to be.

In the case of poor women in the Valley, they would be welcoming their new baby into the Lucio Heaven of double-digit unemployment, teen-pregnancy, record dropout rates, massive welfare participation rates, political and moral corruption, record rates of child physical and sexual abuse, and all the other niceties of civilization as Eddie has known it.

They will be able to have fine political representation as Eddie has given them with his hand in the gutting of Workman's Compensation to favor business, tort reform to limit redress of wrongs by business and the medical industry, his private profiting from lobbying for private prison corporations to house the next bunch of dropouts of Valley schools, and, of course, a new batch of Democratic voters who will pull the palanca for Eddie and his gang of chicken-plate politicians who provide them with a pachanga or two accompanied by a conjunto come election time.

When he is not convincing the Port of Brownsville commissioners to dump Brown and Root for Dannenbaum Engineering to effect the $21-million swindle for a price, the Willacy County commissioners to hire his employers to build the new prisons and a few are convicted of taking bribes from them, or donning golf knickers and cap to relax after a week of selling his soul for 30 pieces of silver, he is being self-righteous and telling women he knows better than they do about their own bodies.

He will not be raising the child. He will be too busy signing on to the conservative legislation that will restrict their access to child care, nutrition assistance, educational access, and legal representation.

Having an abortion is a momentous decision for a woman as it is. It is something they have to live with for the rest of their lives. They don't need a mental midget dressed as a vaudeville slap-stick comedian who has lived off the public dole for his entire live to preach to them about morals.