Texas rules call for dignified disposal of aborted babies

Texas will soon require its abortion centers and abortion-providing hospitals to cremate or bury the babies they kill.

State law currently allows the remains of aborted babies to be ground up and discharged into a “sanitary sewer system” or incinerated and dumped in a “sanitary landfill.” Set to take effect on Dec. 19, the new regulations—recently adjusted to exclude cases of miscarriage or at-home abortions—will likely face legal challenges.

On June 30, a federal judge blocked a similar law passed by the Indiana state legislature that would also have banned abortions in cases where babies were diagnosed with genetic abnormalities such as Down syndrome. Three days earlier, the Supreme Court in a landmark ruling had struck down a Texas law requiring the state’s abortion centers to meet ambulatory surgical center standards and its abortionists to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Although the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) officially proposed the new rules on July 1, they had been in the works since January. More than 35,000 comments poured in during two monthlong comment periods, said Carrie Williams, chief press officer for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which oversees the DSHS. Negative feedback has come from abortion supporters who assert defending the regulations in court will burden Texas taxpayers. They also claim the regulations are thinly veiled attempts to restrict access to abortion.

In a Nov. 9 press release, Blake Rocap, legislative counsel for NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, called the regulations a “politically motivated attack … with no public health benefit … [that] intrudes on a patient’s access to healthcare.”

But an Austin television station reported Texas state Rep. Mark Keough’s finding that aborted babies’ limbs had poured out of a sewer near a Houston abortion center in 2005. The regulations will ensure “enhanced protection of the health and safety of the public,” the HHSC has said, and fit into Gov. Greg Abbott’s L.I.F.E. initiative to “protect the unborn and prevent the sale of baby body parts.” Federal law prohibits the sale of aborted babies’ body parts for profit, but the rule changes, which don’t require legislative approval, would not apply to tissue donated for research or teaching purposes.

Earlier this month, Texas state Sen. Charles Schwertner, an orthopedic surgeon, prefiled Senate Bill 8 in advance of the Jan. 2017 legislative session to ban all sale and exchange of aborted babies’ tissues.

Tuesday afternoon, Texas state Sen. Don Huffines prefiled Senate Bill 258 to “reinforce the recent DSHS rule changes.” In a press release, Huffines said the intent of his bill is to “restore some modicum of human decency and dignity to the most innocent among us.”

In 2014, nearly 55,000 babies were aborted in Texas.