Tony Tinderholt Wants Death Penalty for Abortion
Many Republican-led states are engaged in a grotesque contest to see who can pass the most restrictive anti-abortion legislation, often with the goal of getting a hearing before the Supreme Court. Will it be Ohio, which on Wednesday passed a “heartbeat bill” that will now go to the governor’s desk, or Mississippi and Kentucky, which passed similar legislation? Or Alabama, which is considering a bill that would criminalize all abortions and likens abortions to atrocities like the Holocaust and the Cambodian killing fields? Well, we may have a winner in Texas, where one Republican lawmaker has once again put forth a bill that would not only criminalize all abortions, but would equate an abortion with homicide, a crime that can lead to the death penalty in the state.
The bill is the idea of state Representative Tony Tinderholt, an Air Force veteran who the Washington Post notes has been married five times. He introduced a similar bill in 2017, and in an interview that year with the Texas Observer, Tinderholt framed his bill as a way to get people to be “personally responsible” for having sex:
Living like it’s the dark ages.
“Right now, it’s real easy. Right now, they don’t make it important to be personally responsible because they know that they have a backup of ‘oh, I can just go get an abortion.’ Now, we both know that consenting adults don’t always think smartly sometimes. But consenting adults need to also consider the repercussions of the sexual relationship that they’re gonna have, which is a child,” Tinderholt said.
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