In a new federal legal complaint filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, two professors argue that if students miss school for abortion, they should have the right to fail those students because pregnancy is the result of"voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse.”For the last two-odd years, abortion bans have blown the door wide open for truly heinous, wide-ranging legislative attacks on pregnant people.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,'” Bonevac argues in the federal court filing. Bonevac further writes that pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” so students shouldn’t be permitted time off from classes to get abortions; if students do so, professors have a right to flunk them.
“Plaintiffs Hatfield and Bonevac do not intend to accommodate student absences from class to obtain abortions—including illegal abortions and purely elective abortions that are not medically required. Nor will Plaintiffs Hatfield and Bonevac hire a teaching assistant who has violated the abortion laws of Texas or the federal-law prohibitions on the shipment or receipt of abortion pills and abortion-related paraphernalia,” the complaint states.
At the same time that two professors in Texas alongside the state’s attorney general are suing for universities to have the right to discriminate against and punish students for having abortions, anti-abortion legal activist Jonathan Mitchell has been wielding Texas’ abortion laws to try to helpthat they wanted abortion rights left up to states, and for doctors but not women to be punished. Clearly, that was never true.