Republican Governor Greg Abbott justified Texas’ new abortion law, which provided no exceptions for cases of rape, by promising that the state will start working to eliminate rapes.
Lindsey LeBlanc is still actively assisting rape victims in a college town south of Houston one year later.
‘The numbers have stayed consistently high,’ said LeBlanc, executive director of the Sexual Assault Resource Center in Bryan, near Texas A&M University. Despite hiring two additional counselors in the past six months, she still has a waitlist for victims.
She remarked, ‘We are having a hard time keeping up with demand.’
The constant caseloads in Texas are another example of how Republicans have struggled to defend zero-exception abortion bans that are unpopular in public polling, have caused uproar in high-profile cases and are inviting political risk heading into November’s midterm elections.
Since Texas’ law went into effect in September 2021, at least a dozen other states have enacted similar prohibitions that do not grant any exceptions for rape or incest.
Republicans are divided on the lack of exceptions, as seen in West Virginia, where a new law signed this month gives victims of rape and incest a small window to get abortions in exchange for reporting the crime to police.
A recent prohibition was abandoned by South Carolina Republicans because they were unable to secure enough GOP backing.
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