Battle for Life Continues Today in Texas With Special Session

Katie Pavlich | July 01, 2013 7:45 AM

The battle for life continues today in Texas as the second special session of the legislature begins. The first special session ended without a vote on a pro-life bill last week that would have banned abortions after five months and require abortion clinics in the state to meet the same medical standards as regular clinics in order to operate. The legislation, known as SB5, was killed after Democratic Texas Senator Wendy Davis filibustered for hours with rowdy pro-abortion protestors cheering her on.

Monday, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst will introduce SB1, which like SB5, limits abortions to five months and requires abortion clinics to meet a set of basic medical standards in order to operate.

"Our pro-life bill, SB 1, is about protecting the health of Texas women and the preborn.It breaks my heart that over 70,000 women have abortions in Texas each year. Based on medical journals, roughly 1 in 20 women experience complications during the surgical procedure, meaning more than 2,500 Texas women are at risk in a given year," Dewherst said in a statement yesterday. "Shouldn’t all clinics meet the same medical standards, whether they are removing a child’s tonsils, or performing an abortion? If abortion facility owners won't spend a portion of their ill-gotten profits on treating women safely, they should be shut down.In addition, this bill lowers the abortion threshold from 6 months to 5 months, which will save 350-400 Texas babies a year. When we stand for life, we stand for Texas women and their babies!"

The new bill is likely to be heard on the floor July 8th and 9th, just after the July 4th weekend.

Today, the Capitol is bracing for a barrage of protestors, including occupiers. More from Hot Air:

After Texas State senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster kept anti-abortion legislation from passing by the end of the legislature’s special session, Texans are gearing up for a second special session, and it’s going to be theatrical. Predicting protests is an imperfect science, but one statehouse source tells me he’s hearing that up to 5,000 protesters could show up on Monday for the session’s first day. And a Texas Republican insider tells me to expect protests intended to shut the capitol down that could be reminiscent of the Wisconsin union protests in 2011. He adds that they’ve heard that large buses could be bringing in protesters, and that food trucks may help to keep them fed. In other words, Austin might look a little bit like Occupy.

“This time, I expect the protesting to be even louder,” says Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. He adds that his office won’t put up with the kind of tactics that helped postpone the vote on Tuesday night.