Think Abortion Isn’t on the Ballot in Texas? Think Again.

(Editor’s note: This is Part I of a series. Looking for a voting guide on abortion rights? Find key races and legislators’ voting history here.)

Texans’ lives are on the line this election cycle.

Josseli Barnica, of Houston, died of an infection in 2021, three days after doctors failed to provide care for her miscarriage, according to an investigation published by ProPublica on Wednesday. The 28-year-old mother waited for 40 hours for her fetus’s heart to stop beating before doctors would act. During that time, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria, the nonprofit news outlet found.

It is frighteningly similar to the story of Victoria, which senior editor Leslie Rangel wrote about earlier this month. Victoria is Leslie’s sister, and she had a miscarriage in 2022. When she sought care, Victoria sat hemorrhaging for hours in the emergency waiting room in the conservative small town of Waxahachie. “I’m bleeding uncontrollably, I can’t stop it, and no one can help me because everyone’s afraid of what will happen,” she said. It happened to her again in 2023. Hospital after hospital told her they couldn’t help. After more than 24 hours of hemorrhaging, and three drenched diapers, she finally found a hospital that would treat her. “My fear was that I wouldn't wake up,” she told The Barbed Wire. “My fear was it was over for having a family.”

These stories have become more and more common since Texas’ near-total abortion ban took effect in 2022. That same year, Ondrea Cummings’ water broke too early in her pregnancy. “Despite being at high risk for infection, because of Texas’ extreme laws, I was told I had to wait, which I did, in the hospital for days,” Cummings, of San Antonio, said at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris last week. She survived a partial lung collapse and surgery to remove fluid, resulting in a scar that runs from her pelvis to her breast. “I nearly lost my life,” Cummings said. “I remember praying, ‘God, just allow me to be peaceful when I go.” Her daughter, Emory Jade, lived for only a few minutes.

Texas politicians have laid claim to what happens inside womens’ bodies, then abdicated responsibility for the gruesome reality — blood-drenched diapers and death — of life without reproductive healthcare.

The terror that has come with being child-bearing age in America today has reinvigorated an oft-maligned subset of the electorate: single-issue voters. Abortion is on the ballot in 10 states; but it’s figuratively on the ballot in Texas, too. Yet it’s not the single-issue —– nor is it drawing the single-issue voters —– of yore.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 changed the calculus for many Americans. A record 32% of U.S. voters have said in 2024 they’d only choose a candidate for major office who shared their views on abortion, which is significantly higher than in 2020, according to a May Gallup poll. Harris’s Friday night event was further evidence. The crowd of 30,000 at Houston’s Shell Energy Stadium heard speakers who’d suffered under Texas’ abortion ban. Harris called the state “ground zero” for reproductive rights.

Rally-goers in the Houston audience told The Barbed Wire they felt it on a personal level. Much of that is thanks to a set of 2021 laws that cemented the state as one of the most restrictive on abortion access in the country. Senate Bill 8 outlawed abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, even in the case of rape or incest; House Bill 1280, the “trigger” law that went into effect after the Dobbs decision, made providing abortions a felony punishable by up to life in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Early data and research show the laws have made Texas an even more dangerous place to be pregnant and give birth (the bar, sadly, was already low). The rate of maternal mortality cases  from 2019 to 2022 rose by 56%, compared to 11% nationally, according to the nonprofit Gender Equity Policy Institute and NBC News. Infant deaths in Texas rose 12.9% from 2021 to 2022, according to a recent study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The Lone Star State also leads the country in maternity ward closures.

And researchers and abortion advocates warn it could get worse — because conservative politicians are planning additional draconian measures. The Republican Party of Texas approved a plank classifying abortion as homicide, teeing up legislators to make it punishable by death. The authors of “Project 2025” would have the government surveil miscarriages and stillbirths, then decide how to punish women for the already traumatic experience.

Today, abortion isn’t simply an issue of conviction or even of healthcare for voters. The life-or-death stakes have hit issues of safety, privacy, economics, personal liberty, equity, and the role and size of government.

“Reproductive justice and abortion access literally touches all facets of our life,” said Blair Wallace, a policy and advocacy strategist at ACLU Texas. Wallace told The Barbed Wire that Cummings and her contemporaries like Amanda Zurawski — the lead plaintiff in a case against the state for similar harms she experienced during pregnancy — are changing the narrative.

“The anti-abortion movement has done such a job of normalizing attacks on abortion,” Wallace said. “It's oftentimes not until they are faced with these impossible, traumatizing decisions that they have to actually think about how abortion policy interacts with people in their real life.”

Wallace said it’s been heartbreaking to see Cummings, Zurawski, and others share their stories at rallies, in political ads, and in documentaries. But their experiences are crucial in understanding the severity and complexity of the issue. To that end, Zurawski’s story was featured in “Zurawski v Texas,” which screened in theaters over the last week.

“These cases are showing people what happens when you ban abortion, and it's not necessarily what they thought,” said a representative from the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a trailer for the documentary.

In the film, Zurawski visited family in her home state of Indiana. Her mother said she was a lifelong Republican. But now? “I will vote differently than I ever voted in my life because of what happened to you,” she said.

“It’s a nonstarter for me,” said another family member. “Admittedly, I didn’t know that what you went through was possible.”

Yet, the experiences and convictions of abortion-rights voters — whose numbers are apparent in national and local election coverage — have been under-valued and even lambasted. A Senate candidate from Ohio recently called women voting on abortion “crazy,” while another from Montana said they were “indoctrinated.”

“After all, as much as I don’t mind rhetorically reclaiming being a ‘single issue’ voter, let’s not lose sight of what Republicans really mean when they hurl the phrase in our direction: Conservative men are trying to collapse the infinitely far-reaching, complicated, and life-changing impact of abortion rights into a throw-away talking point,” wrote author Jessica Valenti in her substack, Abortion, Every Day.

Some races have been well-covered —– plenty has been written, for example, about the presidential candidates’ stances on abortion. Similarly, much attention has been paid to the unusually tight race between incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz and Congressman Colin Allred.

However, editors at The Barbed Wire found few voting guides from news outlets dedicated to the issue, so we set out to create our own. We spoke to Wallace and others at the ACLU Texas, along with Valenti’s team at Abortion, Every Day and others working on the ground in this space. We also conducted our own research and built our own data.

Makayla Montoya Frazier, who runs a San Antonio-based organization called Buckle Bunnies, which helps people find abortion care, told us that it’s just important to be informed on all smaller local races on the ballot.

“We noticed that a lot of folks, they'll say, ‘Oh, I'm going to vote for Harris because of abortion access’ and I'm like, ‘Great! But it cannot stop there,” said Montoya Frazier. “Abortion access is always an issue, and if you're going to be an issue-based voter, then you need to support the organizations who are already doing the work in your community.”

In that spirit, we analyzed races further down this year’s ballot, focusing on three segments of the election that may have the biggest impact on reproductive rights in Texas going forward: state legislators, the Texas Supreme Court, and city ordinances.

Texas Legislative Races

There’s a long process to get a bill passed into law. Texas 2036, a non-profit that focuses on research, data and policy, explains it in detail here, but, ultimately, the House and Senate are the final groups who decide whether a bill goes to the governor’s desk.

That brought us back to the legislators who voted on Senate Bill 8, which outlawed abortion after six weeks and House Bill 1280, which made providing abortions a felony. And in Texas, support for abortion rights isn’t always consistent along party lines.

In the Senate, 18 voted yea and 12 voted nay on S.B. 8, with one absent. For H.B. 1280, 19 voted yea and 12 voted nay.

In the House, 83 voted yea, 64 voted nay, 1 voted present on S.B. 8. For H.B. 1280, 81 voted yea, 61 voted nay, and two voted present or did not vote.

Of those who voted, 101 are running for reelection — 10 in the Senate and 91 in the House. Of those races, 57 were competitive.

The breakdown of yea and nay votes by all who are running for reelection is almost evenly split: 50 yea, 51 nay. But there are significantly more candidates who voted for the bills who are facing challengers in the general election: 39, compared to 18 who voted against the bills.

A large portion — 44 — are unopposed in the general election. Of those, 33 voted against the bills, compared to 11 who voted for them.

Those findings suggest that legislators who supported aggressive conservative agendas, particularly on abortion, are being challenged at greater numbers for their seats by candidates of the opposing party.

However, it’s far from conclusive. Matthew Simpson, co-director of policy and advocacy at ACLU Texas, said that redistricting has played a big role.

“We've had a hard time finding patterns” because of the last round of redistricting, Simpson said. “Both Republican and Democrat incumbents were protected.”

Texas Supreme Court Judicial Races:

In the first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Zurawski was one of 22 plaintiffs to sue the state. The case made it to the Texas Supreme Court and asked for the judges to clarify what constitutes an “emergency” in the case of medical exceptions to the state’s abortion law as defined by State Bill 8. The all-Republican court declined to clarify, and rejected the claims from the Texas women despite their life-altering pregnancy complications.

Texas is one of eight states that holds partisan elections for supreme court justices, who hold six-year terms. Republicans have won every Texas Supreme Court race since 1989, but there are active challengers to each of the three Republican incumbents up for reelection.

Justice John Devine, the most ardent anti-abortion jurist on the court, faces perhaps the biggest challenge from Christine Vinh Weems, a 48-year-old district court judge in Harris County.

Weems, whose family fled Vietnam, would be the first-ever Asian American person elected to a statewide office in Texas. She presided over the first challenge to Texas abortion laws in the wake of the Dobbs decision, when a group of abortion providers sued after Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that Texas’ original Civil War-era ban was back in effect. Weems granted a temporary injunction, until the “trigger” law went into effect shortly after.

Weems told the Texas Tribune she ran against Devine over his attendance, ethics, and anti-abortion record. “If you’re going to express such a strong opinion that you’re willing to be arrested for it, perhaps it’s such a strong opinion that when those kinds of cases come before you, you need to recuse yourself,” she said, referencing the fact that Devine has boasted about being arrested dozens of times in the ‘80s for protesting abortion clinics (though later said he’d lost count of how many, exactly).

Devine has made no secret of the fact that his views on abortion helped lead him to the Texas Supreme Court. In 1992, he ran against a Houston trial court judge who granted a restraining order against protesters of a Planned Parenthood clinic during the Republican National Convention. He lost that race but won another two years later.

While running for the state supreme court in 2011, Devine made his pro-life stance part of his campaign. In a series of videos still available on a website called Extremists 4 Life, he and his wife, Nubia, discussed the birth of their seventh child — a risky pregnancy Nubia carried to term despite a diagnosis that the baby had “zero chance of survival.” Nubia survived but the baby, Elizabeth, died an hour after birth.

“During the entirety of this whole experience, it was always going to be Nubia’s decision. She’s the one after all carrying this child. She’s the one who god has entrusted this child to,” Devine said in a video titled “Nubia’s Choice.” “When she came to me to tell me that she no longer agreed with the idea of us terminating this pregnancy, having the abortion, I was relieved.”

Samantha Casiano was one of the plaintiffs in the Zurawski case who were not given the same options granted to Devine’s wife. Casiano vomited on the stand while recounting the day she learned — at 20 weeks pregnant — that her daughter had anencephaly, a birth defect in which the fetal brain and skull do not fully develop. Her doctor would not perform an abortion, forcing her to carry her daughter, Halo, for another three months. She was born prematurely, and she died within hours.

The lower court sided with Casiano and the other plaintiffs, granting an injunction on the law to allow abortions in cases of severe pregnancy complications and fatal fetal abnormalities. The state appealed directly to the Texas Supreme Court, and Devine was the only jurist not present to hear arguments by Casiano’s attorney. The court overruled the injunction. The law was perfectly clear, the justices concluded.

In fact, the justices said in the opinion that “Zurawski’s agonizing wait to be ill ‘enough’ for induction, her development of sepsis, and her permanent physical injury,” weren’t a result of the law at all. During oral arguments, several of the judges pointed fingers at the women’s doctors, asking if they, not the law, were at fault.

The irony, captured in “Zurawski v Texas,” is that doctors are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN in Dallas, was 11 weeks pregnant when she learned her baby had a fatal condition and had to travel out of state for an abortion. Her patient, Lauren Miller, had the same experience. Both are part of the lawsuit.

Seeing the court blame care providers stung for Lindsay London, with the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance. A registered nurse, London started her career in community health, and she grew emotional thinking about “standing at the bedside with your hands tied because of politicians who have no medical training and a medical board who refuse to provide clear guidance.”

“It's horrifying,” London said. “Our responsibility is to do the best we can for our patients as quickly as we can. And these laws have taken that trust and expertise away from medical providers.”

Justice Jane Bland authored the opinion, finding the exception adequate — though, almost a third of Texas OB-GYNs surveyed recently by a healthcare consulting firm said they do not have a clear understanding of the law, with 60% saying they are fearful of legal repercussions.

Bland was elected in 2020 with more than six million votes — the most a candidate for any elected office has received in Texas history. However, the wording of the opinion in the Zurawski case has alarmed many abortion advocates in Texas and beyond. Bland used the term “life-limiting” in place of “fatal fetal abnormality,” part of a trend by anti-abortion activists and conservative groups pushing a narrative that women are discriminating against disabled children, even when they’ve been told by their doctors that there’s no chance of survival. To be clear, there has been an increase in infant deaths in Texas since the abortion ban was enacted.

Bonnie Lee Goldstein, a judge on Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals, is running against Bland. Goldstein had a 24-year legal career and served as a city attorney, a municipal court judge, and a district court judge in Dallas.

“My life experiences have been the stepping stones and building blocks to an incredible legal career. My father passed when I was 13, and I witnessed the difficulties of a single mother of three navigate a world where she had not worked in order to raise children and had no credit in her name,” Goldstein said in a Texas Lawyer voter guide questionnaire. “Her struggle in the face of 1970's established norms was the inception of my strong desire for independence and addressing societal disparities.”

Justice Jimmy Blacklock is the third incumbent up for reelection, and he is facing DaSean Jones, a criminal district court judge in Harris County. Jones would be the first combat veteran in the 180th Criminal Court District, according to his website. He is also a U.S. Army Reserve officer and judge advocate. He served as a field officer in the U.S. Army from 2001 to 2008.

“​In Texas, the constitutional rights of everyday citizens across the state are being attacked by individuals who espouse far-right ideologies and engage in extreme actions to promote their beliefs,” Jones’ website reads. “The rule of law should not be confused for the preservation of conformist values, nationalism, or ethnocentrism.”

Blacklock served as general counsel to Gov. Greg Abbott, leading many of the state’s high-profile cases, including the defense of abortion restrictions. Abbott appointed Blacklock to fill a vacancy on the court in 2018. While running for election later that year when the term expired, Blacklock joined Abbott at the annual Texas Rally for Life — an event that opposes abortion rights.

“I don’t have to guess or wonder how Justice Blacklock is going to decide cases because of his proven record of fighting for pro-life causes,” Abbott said, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Blacklock was also a member of the Federalist Society while at Yale Law School, according to a press release from the school after his appointment to the court. Members of the Federalist Society are widely considered the architects of the successful, decades-long movement to overturn Roe v Wade and shift the U.S. Supreme Court further right.

In a live panel with the documentarians behind “Zurawski v Texas” on Sunday, Casiano and Zurawski were asked what they hoped people would take away from the film. Casiano pointed to the three supreme court justices on the ballot in Texas.

“It’s time to fire them,” Casiano said.

Zurawski echoed the same. “Really pay attention to your ballot. Educate yourself on the issues you care about, certainly reproductive health should be a key issue people are voting on,” she said. “Understand how these people who represent you feel — and know their record and know what they’ve done or not done in the past and vote accordingly.”

Amarillo’s Prop A Ordinance

Residents of Amarillo have the opportunity to vote on Proposition A, which would declare the most populous area of the Texas Panhandle a “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

A “yes” vote for the ordinance would prohibit abortions from being performed on any Amarillo resident — even outside of Texas where the procedure is legal. It would make it illegal for anyone to travel through Amarillo to get an abortion in another state, like neighboring New Mexico. It also would enable any citizen to sue another for $10,000 for helping any Amarillo resident receive an abortion.

“It's cruel, it’s divisive, and we refuse to give up any more of our rights,” said London, with the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance. The Alliance provides abortion-related information and connections to other organizations in the state — meaning it could be the target of lawsuits if the ordinance is passed.

“There doesn’t have to be evidence to file these suits, and there is no protection for double or triple jeopardy,” London said. “You can be sued by endless people for the same allegation, so the constitutionality of it is very questionable.”

London told The Barbed Wire that she and her colleagues have been surprised and excited by an influx of bipartisan support for their efforts: “What we’ve found is that whether or not folks support abortion access, they do not want government overreach. They see that this ordinance is extremism that violates our rights to privacy, freedom and interstate travel.”

And, many who have spoken to the Alliance who don’t support the ordinance, don’t like the idea of pushing a belief onto another person. “We’ve actually found there are far more pro-choice folks in our community, even if they wouldn’t describe themselves that way,” she added.