The draft decision, which was authored by Supreme Court Justice Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea, would also have required the states to provide “accessible and affordable” abortion services by establishing clinics to carry out the killing of the unborn.
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Current rules allow fetal remains to be ground and discharged into a sewer system, incineration or some form of disinfection followed by deposition in a landfill, or “an approved alternate treatment process, provided that the process renders the item as unrecognizable, followed by deposition in a sanitary landfill”. The agency may then hold hearings on it. The rule can go into effect after the comment period ends, without approval from the state legislature.
The proposed rule was made quietly, without any press release or public hearing. Abbott had been talking with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission for months about making a change, Abbott spokeswoman Ciara Matthews said.
The article says that between 1999 and 2013, more than 2,000 women died from abortion but no documentation for those statistics is provided.
That struck at the heart of why proponents of the Texas law and others like it said the provisions were necessary in the first place: to protect women’s health and raise the standards of abortion care, which they claimed were dangerously lacking.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants lawmakers, when they meet next year, to make the proposed regulations state law.
Texas is proposing new regulations for abortion providers that would require them to dispose of aborted fetal tissue either through burial or cremation, saying the measures are meant to preserve human dignity.
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Planned Parenthood came under fire recently over allegations of illegally sharing patients’ confidential information as part of the organization’s practice of harvesting fetal tissue from abortions, according to The Hill.
