How much money can a state Senator from Texas make for her campaign account by filibustering against a bill to ban late-term abortions?
“Texas state Senator Wendy Davis has reaped nearly $1 million in political donations since she staged a nearly 11-hour filibuster that ultimately failed to stop the Texas legislature approving stringent new restrictions on abortion in the state, her office said on Monday,” according to Reuters.
From the report:
Davis, 50, who is running for re-election to the state Senate in 2014 and has been called upon by some fellow Democrats to run for Texas governor, raised $933,000 in two weeks and now has more than $1 million in her campaign coffers, her campaign said.
Texas campaign finance reports, due by midnight Monday for fundraising in the first six months of the year, show that Davis has a large following in Texas as well as outside the state. She received donations from 15,290 contributors, her campaign said.
The report shows Davis raised $580,000 from Texas contributors and the balance of $353,000 from out-of-state donors. The majority of the funds were raised in the period after she staged the filibuster.
In a new column at National Review, pro-life writer Rich Lowry says Davis is the perfect example of an abortion extremist.
Wendy Davis is the country’s most prominent defender of late-term abortions. What Rosa Parks was to desegregation, what Eunice Kennedy Shriver was to respect for the disabled, what Elizabeth Cady Stanton was to women’s suffrage, the Texas state senator is to abortion after 20 weeks of fetal development.
Texas just passed a law banning abortion after that point, a measure supported by the public and by common sense, but not by the stalwart Davis. For her trouble, she has been accorded fawning media coverage and showered with $1 million in donations, showing that abortion radicalism sells in America — so long as it is pro-abortion radicalism.
A ban after 20 weeks, near the end of the second trimester, represents a minor restriction on abortion by any reasonable standard. Many European countries, which we tend to consider laxer on such matters, ban abortion well before 20 weeks. It’s not just that Wendy Davis is out of step in Texas; she would be out of step in Belgium and France, where abortion is banned after 12 weeks.
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Davis likes to say that fewer than 1 percent of abortions in Texas take place the 20th week or later, without realizing how that damns her own case. By her own admission, she is not willing to give up even 1 percent of abortions. Nationally, opponents of the 20-week prohibition cite the same 1 percent statistic. Even if it is accurate — and no one can know for sure — that means 8,000 abortions a year after 20 weeks.
If the balance of the Democratic party weren’t invested in protecting abortion as a kind of secular sacrament — “sacred ground,” as Nancy Pelosi calls it — it would recoil from Wendy Davis in embarrassment. Instead, it lionizes her. And why not? She exemplifies its moral and political bankruptcy on this issue.
