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| Photo Credit: AP. |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — When Texas’ new abortion law made no exceptions in cases of rape, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott defended it with an assurance: Texas would get to work eliminating rapes.
One year
later, Lindsey LeBlanc is busy as ever helping rape victims in a college town
outside Houston.
“The numbers
have stayed consistently high,” said LeBlanc, executive director of the Sexual
Assault Resource Center in Bryan, near Texas A&M University. Despite hiring
two additional counselors in the past six months, she still has a waitlist for
victims.
“We are
struggling to keep up with demand,” she said.
The constant
caseloads in Texas are another example of how Republicans have struggled to
defend zero-exception abortion bans that are unpopular in public polling, have
caused uproar in high-profile cases and are inviting political risk heading
into November’s midterm elections. A year since Texas’ law went into effect in
September 2021, at least a dozen states also have bans that make no exceptions
in cases of rape or incest.
The absence
of exceptions has caused divisions among Republicans, including in West
Virginia, where a new law signed this month allows a brief window for rape and
incest victims to obtain abortions only if they report to law enforcement
first. Recently, South Carolina Republicans scuttled a proposed ban after
failing to get enough GOP support.
“It really disgusts me,” said Republican South
Carolina state Sen. Katrina Shealy, ripping into her male colleagues on the
floor of the state Senate.
Republican
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, also of South Carolina, allowed exceptions under the
proposed national abortion ban he introduced last week. The proposal has
virtually no chance of passing, with even GOP leaders not immediately backing
it, reflecting how Republicans have broadly struggled to navigate the issue of
abortion with voters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this
summer.
Overwhelming
majorities of voters think their state should generally allow abortion in
specific cases, including rape, incest or if the health of the pregnant person
is endangered. Even Republicans are seeing it as a line with some voters.
“It’s a very
gray issue,” said Claudia Alcazar, the GOP chairwoman in Starr County along the
Texas-Mexico border that has become a new political battleground after Republicans
made big gains with more conservative Hispanic voters in 2020.
She said she
knows those who are “hardcore, never have abortion for any reason, period. And
then I have the other ones that are like, ‘Well, you know, it depends.’”
In Texas,
the blowback was swift when Abbott said last September: “Texas will work
tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets.”
Critics called it detached from reality. A sexual assault hotline in Houston
has answered almost 4,800 calls through August this year — putting it on track
to exceed last year’s volume of 4,843.
As of this
summer, all abortions were banned in Texas except if it would save a mother’s
life.
Asked what
Abbott has done in the past year to eliminate rape, spokeswoman Renae Eze
highlighted older measures to clear rape test kit backlogs, a law signed in
June aimed at coordinating and expanding sexual assault resources and a task
force his office launched in 2019 to address the issue.
“To prevent
such heinous crimes before they happen, and to prosecute any criminals to the
full extent of the law, Governor Abbott has aggressively fought against
defunding the police and led bail reform efforts to prevent the release of
dangerous criminals,” Eze said in a statement.
More than
14,000 rape crimes have been reported in Texas since the law took effect last
year, according to data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. That was
slightly down from the year before and consistent with a decline in other
violent crime figures across the state.
Crisis
centers in Texas say the number of rape victims they’ve accompanied to
hospitals for exams is rebounding since the pandemic restrictions kept
advocates from entering. The Women’s Center in Fort Worth has made more than
650 visits to counsel victims undergoing exams in the past year compared to
about 340 in the year prior, said Alisha Mathenia, the assistant director of
crisis services at the center.
The majority
of sexual assaults are never reported to police, making any available data an
incomplete picture. And about 8 out of 10 sexual assaults are committed by a
person known to the victim, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National
Network.
“We’re not
talking about a large of number of rapists walking around on the street. That’s
a myth,” said Democrat Donna Howard, a state representative in Austin who
co-authored the bill creating Abbott’s task force.
At The SAFE
Alliance in Austin, where sexual assault victims can get exams and medical care
at its Eloise House, senior director Juliana Gonzales said it’s admirable for
Texas to work on rape prevention. “But I also think it’s important for the
state to live in the reality that we have to respond to sexual assault,” she
said.
Stengle
reported from Dallas.
Find more AP
coverage of the abortion issue: https://apnews.com/hub/abortion