State Senator Wendy Davis started a filibuster at 11:18 a.m. Tuesday in the hope of holding the floor by talking until the Senate’s special session ended at midnight.
AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas Democrats attempted to prevent Republicans from passing a bill on Tuesday that would give the state some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, even as Gov. Rick Perry appeared ready to keep lawmakers in town to give the bill another chance.
[h=6]Jennifer Whitney for The Texas Tribune[/h] A sonogram at the Whole Woman’s Health Surgical Center in San Antonio, one of five Texas abortion clinics that would meet tighter abortion restrictions under a Texas bill. Opponents of the legislation said it would force 37 other clinics to close.
[h=6]Erich Schlegel for The New York Times[/h] Women’s rights advocates waited to attend the Senate session.
The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards that hospital-style surgical centers do, and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
Supporters of the bill, including the governor and other top Republicans, said the measures would protect women’s health and hold clinics to safety standards, but women’s rights advocates said the legislation amounted to an unconstitutional, politically motivated attempt to shut legal abortion clinics. The bill’s opponents said it would most likely cause all but 5 of the 42 abortion clinics in the state to close, because the renovations and equipment upgrades necessary to meet surgical-center standards would be too costly.
On Tuesday, the Senate took up a version of the bill that the House had passed the day before. But the 30-day special session of the Legislature was set to expire at midnight.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presiding officer of the Senate and a supporter of the bill, asked Senator Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat, if she still intended a filibuster, as she had announced. She told him yes, and at 11:18 a.m., she began talking.
Ms. Davis, wearing pink sneakers, stood for hours on the floor of the Senate in an effort to run out the clock before lawmakers could vote on the bill.
Republicans, who control both the Senate and House, would probably have another chance at passage if her filibuster succeeded. Mr. Perry, who called the special session and put the abortion legislation, Senate Bill 5, on the agenda, may call a second special session and tell lawmakers to consider the bill again.
“Democrats are likely to win the battle but lose the war over Senate Bill 5,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
Professor Jones and other political analysts said additional time would limit Democratic tactics. “It seems likely that the governor will call another special session,” said James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “He’s demonstrated that he has no qualms about requiring the Legislature’s presence in Austin for this purpose.”
He added, “The Democrats will have few options for resisting through an entire session.”
The five clinics that would remain open if the bill passed are the only ones in Texas that meet the surgical-center requirements, and all are in large cities; Austin, San Antonio and Dallas each have one, and Houston has two. Advocates for abortion rights said that the burden on those five clinics to provide women’s health services would be extreme, and that women in rural areas and small towns far from those cities would be underserved.
Two clinics in McAllen and Harlingen in South Texas — the only abortion providers in the area — would close, they said, forcing women seeking abortions to travel a few miles across the border into Mexico rather than drive four hours north to San Antonio.
In the Capitol’s second-floor Senate chamber, Ms. Davis stood holding a microphone. Many of her colleagues’ seats were empty, but dozens of women’s rights advocates watched quietly from the gallery upstairs. Ms. Davis spoke about her opposition to the bill, calling it a “raw abuse of power” by Mr. Perry and other Republican leaders to shut legal clinics, but also read aloud various documents, letters and statements, including testimony from numerous opponents of the bill.
Ms. Davis is something of a filibuster star among Texas Democrats. At the end of the legislative term in 2011, she forced Mr. Perry to call a special session after her filibuster ran the clock out on a budget bill that included billions of dollars in cuts to public education. Lawmakers came back in special session and passed the cuts later, however.
In Bismarck, N.D., the Center for Reproductive Rights, a women’s rights group, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday to block the country’s most stringent abortion law, a state ban on abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy. Adopted in March, the law forbids abortions once a fetal heartbeat is “detectable,” which can be as early as six weeks and before some women know they are pregnant.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that women have a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is often around 24 weeks into pregnancy. The enforcement of another early limit on abortions — a ban at 12 weeks that Arkansas enacted in March — was temporarily blocked last month by a federal judge, who said it was likely to be found unconstitutional.
Erik Eckholm contributed reporting from New York, and Laura Tillman from McAllen, Tex.
