Who’s wrong in ‘right to life’ split? Texas group’s political scoring doesn’t add up
Every pro-life group opposes abortion.
But not every pro-life group is as extreme as Texas Right to Life.
The West-Texas-funded activist group has been visiting Fort Worth lately, first to take up for a very sick infant whose own doctors at Cook Children’s consider her case to be hopeless, then to endorse political candidates.
We took note of Texas Right to Life two years ago, when Texas’ Roman Catholic bishops formally distanced from the group after a campaign “scorecard” opposed a state lawmaker with a 100-percent anti-abortion voting record.
Since then, Texas Right to Life has been fined $7,500 for campaign ethics violations in a Dallas-area state Senate race.
With $1.25 million from drilling equipment millionaires Dan and Farris Wilks of Cisco, the group has become a big-money player in Texas politics, along with Midland-funded Empower Texans.
Now, Texas Right to Life supports a Colleyville challenger against a Fort Worth congresswoman who is endorsed by the Virginia-based National Right to Life Committee.
The national and Texas groups are affiliated but operate separately, NRLC political director Karen Cross wrote from Virginia.
“It is the long-held policy of National Right to Life to endorse pro-life incumbents,” she wrote by email.
“If someone has worked with us to save unborn children, we support them for re-election. Congresswoman Kay Granger is a strong advocate for unborn children.”
Relentless ads backing former Colleyville Mayor Pro Tem Chris Putnam are funded by a seven-figure campaign by the anti-tax Club for Growth, which often challenges incumbents.
One ad uses an MSNBC video clip of Granger in 2007. Asked about her endorsement of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Granger said she was “pro-choice” and that “a woman makes a decision with their own self and her own physician, her own family.”
Ever since Granger was first elected in 1996 with money from the WISH List, a pro-choice Republican group, a faction of Republicans have consistently doubted her opposition to abortion.
Granger says she has now opposed abortion for 10 years. She is also endorsed by the Virginia-based, pro-life Susan B. Anthony List Campaign Fund.
It’s not unusual to see a split in the pro-life faction of the Republican party, where some of Texas’ most pro-life lawmakers sometimes aren’t extreme or perfect enough.
Depending on your viewpoint, Texas Right to Life is “either refreshingly consistent or dangerously extreme,” SMU political science professor Matthew Wilson said.
“Endorsement and support from them signals that a candidate is ‘all in’ on the pro-life cause, prioritizing the issue and pushing pro-life positions even when they are politically inconvenient. The issue, however, is that some of those candidates advocate other controversial positions that divide the pro-life caucus.”
Texas Right to Life also supports state Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington,. who filed a bill last session that would have allowed for the prosecution of women for having an abortion and punished it as any other murder.
(Texas Right to Life did not support the bill.)
Two years ago, Texas Right to Life attacked pro-life conservatives for allowing abortions in cases of severe fetal abnormalities.
In the split with the Catholic bishops over the “scorecard,” the bishops wrote that it was “not based on a fair analysis.”
The split also involves end-of-life issues such as the case of 1-year-old Tinslee Lewis of Fort Worth, born with a congenital heart defect and living on a ventilator since birth at Cook Children’s Medical Center.
The president of Texans for Life, Kyleen Wright of Mansfield, told reporters: “Basically a dying little girl is being tortured to live in paralysis and sedation in agony.”
The Legislature was close last year to rewriting the Texas “10-day rule” and extending the time limit to 45 days for hospitals to end futile care in cases such as Lewis’. But doctors opposed the bill on ethical grounds, and it didn’t pass.
Now, Texas Right to Life has made Cook Children’s into a political punching bag over the hospital’s loving care for Lewis, including the four months on life support before a hospital ethics committee invoked the current futile-care laws.
That doesn’t really seem pro-life.
This story was originally published February 10, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
