West Texas News

Residents in the city of Plainview have launched a Citizen Initiative Petition seeking to outlaw abortion. 

With the help of Right to Life of East Texas and West Texas for Life, Plainview residents formed a Petitioners' Committee, comprised of 10 qualified voters. These 10 residents will circulate the petition and aim to get the signatures of at least 10% of the city's registered voters. 

There are 10,724 registered voters, so the petition needs at least 1,072 signatures. Once the signatures have been collected, the Plainview City Council will review the petition and either adopt it right away or put it on the ballot in the next election. As of May 2021, 26 cities in Texas had outlawed abortion within their city limits, including Lubbock, Abernathy, and Levelland.

 “It is shameful that Greg Abbott and other politicians have allowed abortion to continue in Texas for so many years," said Republican gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines. "I applaud the people of Plainview for their efforts to ban the slaughter of infants from their city. When I am Governor of Texas, I will outlaw abortion in the state of Texas with no exceptions. And I will never ask permission from the federal government.” 

In September, the Texas law S.B. 8, also known as the Heartbeat Bill, went into effect. The law bans abortions after six weeks into pregnancy, at which point an ultrasound can typically detect fetal cardiac activity.

According to The Texas Tribune, on Jan. 17,  the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent a legal challenge to the abortion law to the state’s Supreme Court.  

Meanwhile, the law will stay in effect.

“The best thing would have been for the Supreme Court to block this unconstitutional law, but we didn’t get that,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates four abortion clinics in Texas, to the Tribune. “So we just have to keep trying to get some relief from this law.”

According to Statista.com, in 2019, 630,000 abortion procedures were reported in the U.S. Between the Supreme Court ruling to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and 2019, at least 41,901,000 abortion procedures were performed.