My local NPR and PBS radio affiliate, KERA, is a pretty reliable font of bad journalism: First, there was that breathless report about Chicago’s being ravaged by gangsters armed with explosive bullets, which do not actually exist, and now comes a report about Texas’s new abortion law that gets it almost precisely wrong.
KERA claims, falsely, that the Texas law empowers random people to sue women for procuring abortions. In fact, the law is designed to expose not the women seeking abortions but almost everybody else involved in the procedure to civil liability. On this, you need not take my word — you could consult Professor Jessie Hill of the Case Western University law school, among others, as this ABC News report did, or the decidedly non-sympathetic folks over at BuzzFeed News. The law is open-ended enough that one might be exposed to liability for giving a woman a ride to an abortion facility with the knowledge that an illegal procedure was to be performed, but it is not designed to entangle the mothers themselves.
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