It was a year ago today that Texas State Senator Wendy Davis stood on the Senate floor in Texas and filibustered – an incredibly pleasing word that means prolonged speaking to obstruct progress in a legislative assembly – for an amazing 12 hours to stop a bill passing that would restrict late-term abortions in the state. Knowing how long she’d have to stand for, she wore a back brace, had a catheter fitted and wore pink-laced running shoes in preparation for her bid to block a bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and meant that all abortions would have to take place in surgical centres. Most controversially, advocates claimed that the bill, which limited the place you could get an abortion and the types of drugs that could be used, would drastically decrease access to pregnancy terminations, affectively forcing 37 of the 42 clinics that provide abortions in the state.
And she made it. After her mind-blowing speech, Republicans scrambled to pass the bill, but the vote was ruled too late for a midnight deadline and pro-choice commentators all over the world viewed Wendy’s amazing achievement as an important step forward for women’s reproductive rights.
Everyone loves a story of grit and determination, but have Wendy’s actions actually improved anything for women in America? A year on, what, if anything, has happened in the fight to protect women’s rights?
One of the first – and bizarre – after effects of Wendy Davis’s filibuster was that the hot pink pair of Mizuno Wave Rider 16 trainers she wore became the number one selling shoe on Amazon.com. Davis also raised $1.2 million for her campaign in the six weeks after her filibuster and was featured on the cover of US Vogue magazine that September.
But not everyone was so happy. Unsurprisingly, pro-lifers targetted her with hate, calling her the ‘Abortion Barbie’ and digging up dirt on the fact she'd apparently abandonedher daughters.
And the bad news kept coming. The bill which Davis was fighting to obstructeventually did pass and half of the Lone Star State’s abortion clinics closed. The only exception from the rule is when an abortion is ‘necessary to avert the death or serious serious phsyical function’ of the mother or if there is a ‘severe foetal abnormailty’, meaning the baby has a condition that is ‘incompatible with a life outside the womb’. It hasn't softened public opinion either: the latest polls show that 64% also rejecting abortion in the second trimester (post 20 weeks).
Even Wendy Davis, herself, has moved away from topics like abortion in most of her public appearances and in February went as far as to say she’d support banning abortions after 20 weeks – a key component of the law she stood again. The cynic in you might point to her fight to become govenor as the reason behind her sudden U-turn.
On the Facebook page dedicated to the
, a post says the event is described as a reason ‘to come together and reflect on how far we’ve come this past year and the work still left before us’.
And it really does look like there’s still quite a lot of work left to do. In Texas, at least...
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.