Wendy Davis, the late-term abortion advocate from Texas who failed dismally in her run for governor, hinted that she might try running for office again.
Davis is a former Texas state senator who rose to the national spotlight in 2013 when she wore pink tennis shoes to filibuster a Texas pro-life law to ban late-term abortions and require abortion facilities to meet basic health and safety standards. Since then, Davis has been active in the pro-abortion movement.
After losing the Texas gubernatorial race by a huge margin, Davis began an organization to help pro-abortion women like herself get elected to office. She also campaigned heavily for pro-abortion presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last year.
This week, she told Cosmopolitan that her current work does not mean that she won’t try running for office again. Davis said she is thinking about when the “electoral climate in Texas [will] be right” for her to run again.
She told the magazine:
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to run again myself someday. Once you’ve run for office once, you no longer suffer any romantic ideas about it. You know how hard it is. It takes a lot out of you, especially when you lose and you can feel like you let yourself or other people down. Honestly, more often than not, you can come out feeling bloodied and sweaty and scarred — even though you know that was all on behalf of something that really mattered. When you do run, you have to be ready to give it your all again. You have to ask yourself, “Am I there yet? Are there conditions in the electoral climate that might make things turn out differently this time?” I’m trying to figure out when I should put myself back out there, and when will the electoral climate in Texas be right for me.
Townhall writer Matt Vespa first noticed Davis’s hints about running. He pointed out how her radical pro-abortion position was what brought her into the national spotlight in the first place.
“Davis only got national attention because Barack Obama, showing his support for abortion rights, tweeted about her abortion bill filibuster in the Texas Senate,” Vespa wrote. “If she wanted to get beyond that, that’s her fault, as Davis had to have known she was on the national state solely because of her pro-choice advocacy.”
And her position is a radical one that is not popular with voters. The bill that she filibustered prohibits abortions after 20 weeks when strong scientific evidence indicates unborn babies can feel pain. The legislation has strong public support. Polls consistently show that abortion activists like Davis are a small minority in their support of late-term abortions.
According to the Susan B. Anthony List, “Nationwide polling by the polling company, inc./WomanTrend, Quinnipiac, National Journal, Huffington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post/ABC News has found that a plurality or majority of Americans support limiting abortion after five months, women in higher numbers than men.”
In a 2016 interview, Davis made it clear that she supports abortion for any reason.
“This choice [abortion] should be up to each and every one of us,” Davis told Broadly. “We ought not to be judged no matter the reason.”
Fighting to allow unborn babies to be aborted for any reason up until birth is not something most Americans want from their elected officials. Hopefully, Davis will consider that before she decides to run again.
