Fourteen Texas Republican lawmakers are already planning their next move against abortion access in a post-Roe United States. They’re going to introduce bills going after corporations that pay for abortion in states where it is legal, barring companies from offering health insurance that covers abortion, and even potentially involving criminal charges against executives, The Texas Tribune reports.
Responding to an announcement by Lyft CEO Logan Green that the company will cover costs for some of its employees forced to travel more than 100 miles for abortion care as well as covering legal fees for drivers sued under abortion vigilante laws, the Texas Republicans wrote, “The state of Texas will take swift and decisive action if you do not immediately rescind your recently announced policy to pay for the travel expenses of women who abort their unborn children.”
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The next Texas legislative session is seven months away, so “swift” action is definitely an exaggeration.
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If Texas Republicans pass this law, they’re going to be attacking many of the same companies they’ve bragged about drawing to their state. When Tesla announced it would move its headquarters to Austin, Gov. Gregg Abbott attributed the move to CEO Elon Musk seeing the state as a place for innovation and transformation. “He knows he has a better ability to do that in Texas with the freedoms that we offer him, with the low costs that we offer him, than he does in other places, like California,” Abbott said.
Freedoms, eh? Tesla is among the companies that have said they will cover employees’ costs in traveling out-of-state for abortion care, and now Texas Republicans are threatening to bar such companies from doing business in Texas.
Other companies that have made similar commitments include Amazon, the second-largest employer in the United States; dating apps Bumble, based in Austin, and Match, based in Dallas; Levi Strauss; Salesforce; Yelp; and Starbucks. That would be a lot of major companies for Republicans to ban from doing business in Texas over their internal abortion-related policies, and would create an interesting challenge for Abbott and future Texas governors hoping to lure new businesses into the state by promising “freedom.”
The backdrop of all of this, though, is the determination of Republican lawmakers in Texas and other states to make pregnant people suffer, placing the state’s control of pregnant bodies above every other priority. It's already working. It’s not enough for them.
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