The law deputizes private citizens to enforce its anti-abortion regime and offers $10,000 cash incentives as a sweetener to do so.

Catholic pro-lifers and leaders of pro-life organizations who otherwise support the law's aim to curb legal abortions, have serious qualms about the statute's unusual enforcement mechanism.

They say it risks creating an unseemly bounty system in Texas while establishing disastrous legal precedents elsewhere.

"It's like you should be watching your neighbour," one opponent says of the law's deputisation strategy.

She is concerned that the push to enact the law was more about short-term gain for politicians and that it could cause long-term damage for the pro-life movement.

The Texas Heartbeat Act, which took effect on 1 September bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detectable. This is usually around the sixth week of pregnancy - before most women would know they were pregnant. It has an exception for medical emergencies, but none for rape or incest.

The U.S. Supreme Court's precedents say states cannot restrict abortion before the fetus is viable outside the womb - around the 24th week of pregnancy. Federal courts have blocked several states' "heartbeat" bills for violating that standard.

To short-circuit legal challenges, Texas legislators crafted their heartbeat law so that, plaintiffs with no personal connection to a patient or clinic can sue abortion providers or anyone who "aids and abets" the procedure - even the cab driver who takes the patient to the clinic, can be charged.

On 2 September the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 not to block the Texas law, for now. They see the "statutory scheme" involving citizens enforcing the law as "not only unusual, but unprecedented."

If successful in court, a plaintiff can be awarded at least $10,000 for each abortion a defendant performed, aided or abetted. The financial incentive has raised concerns about the law motivating bounties.

Texas Right to Life set up a website allowing for anonymous whistleblowers to report illegal abortions, but the site attracted fraudulent reports and has since been taken offline.

"It leaves mothers in desperate situations right where they were before," writes a Catholic blogger and author.

"It doesn't do anything for the economic reasons women feel driven to abortion. It doesn't protect women from abusive spouses and parents, or anyone else pressuring them into it.

"Meanwhile, health care professionals have to fear a frivolous lawsuit from anyone who hears of them performing a [procedure] to remove a miscarried fetus or a uterine tumor, misunderstands and wants to cash in".

"Making doctors afraid to treat women is putting every woman's life in danger even if she's never considered abortion," she said.

The Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops says the conference celebrates "every life saved by this legislation."

"I think the intent of the law is perhaps very good, but the way we implement it is going to be of concern,"a statement from the Washington Archdiocese says.

"It's one thing to be against abortions, but seeing how all these people can be sued, to me that seems extraordinarily broad. I just don't see where that's helpful. How does that help us become more pro-life as a people?"

Source

• La Croix
• Image: CBS News

Scott Panetti was due to be executed just hours before the stay.

"The Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops today expressed appreciation to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for granting a stay of execution for death row inmate Scott Panetti", read a bishops' statement.

"The Texas Bishops have long taught about the immorality of the death penalty and were particularly vocal seeking mercy for Panetti, who has been diagnosed by several doctors as suffering from severe mental illness."

The stay, the bishops said, "means Panetti's attorneys will have another opportunity to argue that the death penalty in his case would violate the constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The Texas Catholic Conference will continue to advocate for the commutation of Panetti's sentence into institutionalization."

Panetti was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday evening, but the fifth circuit appeals court said it needed time "to fully consider the late arriving and complex legal questions at issue in this matter."

In September 1992, Panetti killed his in-laws Joe and Amanda Alvarado in their home in front of his estranged wife and their 3-year-old daughter. He was heavily armed and dressed in camouflage.

He had been hospitalized for mental illness more than a dozen times before the murders, and is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.

Sources:

• CNA
• Image: The Guardian

Because I had some time before we were supposed to start services, I wandered around the 300 or so folks who shivered in the cold and gathered in the space around the altar (Mass was obligatory—Casa Romero was run by a generous, but iron-fisted Spanish nun).

On the outer edges of the group, I came upon a young, thin girl surrounded by five or six older men. We spoke for a bit; she told me that she was heading out that night with these men, looking to cross through the Wild Horse Desert, a desolate place just north of Brownsville, in an effort to avoid the Border Patrol.

The men, hands stuffed into their pockets, scuffed the ground. They would not meet my eyes, and ignored my handshake.

I found the nun and told her that I was worried about the girl. The nun said to me, "You should be. Please take her to the rectory with you tonight. She is not safe here."

The girl agreed to come and spend Christmas Eve with our religious community that night. She was sixteen years old, and she was from El Salvador. Her arms were covered with scars, about which she would only say, "They burned me with cigarettes."

I gave her my room, for that night, and I took to the couch in the living room. The next morning, as I passed by my bedroom, I saw her kneeling on the floor, her scarred arms held straight out from her sides, her eyes closed, and her head upturned toward the heavens. She was back-lit by the sunlight streaming through the window.

It was Christmas Day, and I felt that God had sent me an angel disguised as skinny, scarred teenaged girl.

She stayed with our community for about two weeks, until some good immigration attorneys managed to get her a special travel permission, and then, into a center that worked with the victims of torture (The Center for Victims of Torture). Continue reading

• Source: Views From Alongside a Border (author's name not noted)
• See also: Gilberto Ramos hoped for a better life, but died alone in a desert
• Image: Fronteras