Under the latest refinement in Texas law, a "fetus" is now defined as "an individual human organism from fertilization until birth." We owe that canny metaphysical precision to the long-haired Republican philosopher from Louisiana Tech via far Southwest Houston, Talmadge Heflin, who attached it as an amendment to the "parental notification" bill - Senate Bill 30 - which passed the House May 21, on its way to the Governor's desk and presidential campaign. The bill was one of Governor Bush's legislative priorities, but the particular shape it assumed on the floor was, to a great extent, a gift of the House Democrats.

Texas thereby became one of forty-one states to mandate some form of "parental involvement" in a minor girl's decision to have an abortion. Nationally, the legal restrictions range from simple notice to one or both parents' consent, and allow for various forms of permissible parental "bypass." S.B. 30, sponsored by Plano Republican Florence Shapiro and carried in the House by Temple Republican Dianne Delisi, requires parental notice and allows only a judicial bypass. That is, a Texas woman seventeen or younger who becomes pregnant and wishes to arrange an abortion without informing her parents must apply for permission from a judge.

The new law may well reduce the number of abortions - at least legal, safe abortions. It will undoubtedly make it more difficult for a pregnant girl to find help outside her immediate family, whether her parents are supportive, neglectful, or abusive. "In the real world in Texas," said Houston Democrat Harold Dutton, who tried several parliamentary maneuvers in an attempt to kill the bill, "grandfathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles play a really important role in the young girls' lives, and to leave them out of the circle makes no sense." One representative said simply, "I think it will put many more young pregnant girls at risk of serious harm."

It doesn't stop there. Heflin's pseudo-scientific amendment, interpreted literally, may have effectively outlawed the prescription to minors of certain kinds of abortifacient contraception. And if a physician should perform an abortion for a woman he believes is of age but who is later discovered to be a minor, the doctor is subject to prosecution.

Heflin's amendment was unsurprising - he or other anti-choice Republicans have been proposing language like it for several sessions - but that he got the chance to bring it to the floor at all was a bitter turn for many Democrats. They say they believed they had an agreement with the anti-abortion Republicans to pass a parental notification bill that would also allow other relatives (grandparents, aunts or uncles, or adult siblings) to stand in for the parents, and that the bill would not be burdened with additional anti-choice amendments on the House floor. Instead, Bush and the Republicans - including Arlene Wohlgemuth, who had failed spectacularly to carry a similar bill last session - were handed a major victory, and the Dems got little or nothing in return. And young women in Texas, particularly those living in difficult or untraditional family circumstances, will have to endure the consequences.

The Texas law is part of a national trend, most recently joined by New Jersey, whose Governor Christine Whitman just signed her own parental notification law. According to William Lutz of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, in the absence of popular support for an outright ban on abortions, anti-choice groups have turned to incremental strategies: laws mandating parental involvement, "informed consent," waiting periods, physician-only procedures, or banning public funding. "All are designed to reduce access to abortion, and they succeed - and they occasionally produce catastrophic results, like young girls dying from illegal abortions."

"It was an absolute bloodbath," said Debra Danburg a few days after the House vote. "I was angered by the bill itself, but the worst part was the corruption of the process." The Houston Democrat was one of only thirty members who held out and voted against S.B. 30, following the failure of several moderating amendments by much closer margins. The most important of these was a proposal by pro-life Galveston Democrat Patty Gray, which would have allowed the notification of other close relatives in lieu of parents. (It failed by three votes, 75-72.) The amendment was all that was left of Gray's own bill, H.B. 5, swept aside by the Shapiro bill in the House State Affairs Committee. After extensive negotiations, Committee Chair Steve Wolens allowed S.B. 30 to the floor, reportedly after a written agreement among Wolens, Gray, and the Republicans (with the concurrence of Governor Bush) that only Gray's family bypass amendment would be added. If there were any such agreement, it was ignored by the Republicans on the House floor. So on May 19, when it became clear that Gray's amendment would fail, Houston Democrat Harold Dutton raised a point of order that killed the bill as written.

For any normal bill, that would have been the end of the story. But as Dutton commented wryly several days later, "Some abortions can apparently be born again." Under Wolens' direction (he was permitted an instant committee meeting to resurrect the bill), and with the eager concurrence of the Democratic leadership (i.e., Speaker Pete Laney and Calendars Committee Chairman Barry Telford), S.B. 30 was miraculously revived only two days later. Dutton was firmly opposed to the bill, but says he was even more offended that the legislative process was abruptly bent to accommodate one law. "There are at least 200 bills that died in Calendars," Dutton said. "Yet that bill, killed on the House floor, goes back into committee on the same day, comes out from the committee on the same day, goes back to Calendars the next day, comes out of Calendars and is back on the House calendar the third day. Why is that? I don't know."

"It was the political profile," said Barry Telford. It is no secret that the Democratic Party is concerned about maintaining its slender majority in the House, together with any slim influence it may retain over upcoming redistricting. The leadership is worried that Democratic incumbents, especially in conservative rural districts, might be singled out next year for being "pro-abortion" or "anti-family." Telford acknowledged that the revival of S.B. 30 was unusual, but said, "I think it was the political explosiveness of it, to be honest with you.... There were a lot of members who wanted this out of the way and behind us. The longer this issue was allowed to fester, the more sour the debate was going to become, the more sour the session was going to become, and potentially poison the well on other matters." Telford said it was a difficult vote for him, and he would have have preferred a bill with more humane bypasses, but he was "committed to parental notification." He said many members genuinely supported a parental notification bill, and were not going to oppose it simply because they hadn't gotten their way on the amendments. Moreover, Telford argued it would be counterproductive for the Democrats to allow members to "get cut up on this issue - members that make the difference in the numbers out there [on the House floor], from rural, conservative Democratic districts that tend to be vulnerable. The Party made a wise choice in not choosing to wade in on this issue."

But by vigorously resuscitating a dead bill, the House leadership had chosen to do exactly that - only on the wrong side. Earlier in the session, a delegation of House Democratic women visited with Speaker Laney about the issue, and were told parental notification had too much conservative Democratic support to defeat outright. But they were also reassured that a deal had been struck: Shapiro's bill, in order to come out of Wolens' State Affairs Committee, would have to carry Gray's family bypass amendment. But when push came very much to shove, Wolens (on a three-day excused absence) wasn't even on the floor to defend his committee substitute, nor to hold the Republicans to their purported agreement.

As Gray's ship went noisily down, several Democrats - Danburg, Norma Chávez, Irma Rangel, Helen Giddings, Garnet Coleman, John Longoria, Senfronia Thompson, and Sylvester Turner, among others - pleaded desperately for a simple recognition that not all Texas families look alike, that many children have been raised by or are closer to grandparents or other relatives, and that insisting on parental notification only would inevitably place some young women directly in harm's way. "Only one in four Texas children live in two-parent families," said Gray, and Giddings noted more bluntly, "'Leave It To Beaver' is dead." Gray even offered a much weaker variation of her family bypass, to require evidence that the daughter had been living outside the parents' home for at least thirty days. Not a vote changed.

Danburg tried to cite the committee agreement, but in Wolens' absence the Republicans were having none of it - they smelled total victory. They passed not only Heflin's foetal definition, but a Warren Chisum amendment that will make it easier to prosecute doctors who insufficiently confirm a patient's age. "Delisi kept insisting that this was only a parental notification bill," Danburg said later, "but it was turned first into an abortion bill, and then it became an abortion harassment act. You can be certain that right-wing groups will pressure prosecutors - who are elected - to prosecute any doctor who has even possibly done an abortion on a teenager. Even if they are innocent, those doctors will have to hire lawyers, and it will be made very expensive for them to continue doing their work." Danburg pointed out that the House Democrats most supportive of abortion rights had been kept away from the development of the legislation, with the result that the floor debate focused solely on the presumed sanctity of the parent-child relationship, with barely a mention of abortion rights or women's rights. "This was a negotiation between the right wing and the extreme right wing," Danburg said. "There was no pro-choice input into the legislation, except minimally for Wolens - and he says he was there primarily as a scrivener, recording the agreement."

Austin Democrat Glen Maxey said that in order to work together legislators must rely on each others' word, but that this session that tradition has often collapsed. He cited similar broken understandings on welfare bills and other matters, and said, "[The notification agreement] is like almost every agreement that the conservative Republicans who are supporting the George Bush presidential campaign have had on this floor. All of them have gone up in smoke, or the compromises have been undone. The Governor has no leadership ability among the Republicans in this Legislature."

But with or without Bush's leadership, the Republicans held their votes - only a single Republican (Tommy Merritt of Longview) defected to vote in favor of the Gray amendment. Seven Democrats bolted to vote against the Gray proposal, which would simply have allowed a frightened, ashamed, confused, or desperate young woman to turn to some close relative she trusted if for some reason she felt she could not confide in her parents. Wolens' absent vote was the eighth, Speaker Laney's potentially the ninth - for an eminently reasonable amendment that failed by three votes. Telford, who delivered a spirited defense of the amendment on the floor, said the Democratic votes against it "made no sense.... They knew we were going to have a bill, and why they did not take the opportunity to make the bill more humane, is a mystery to me." (For the complete list of Democratic defectors, see "Mommy and Daddy Know Best.")

Significantly, three of the conservative Democrats most often mentioned as potentially vulnerable on the abortion issue - David Counts, Judy Hawley, and Bob Turner - did not find it necessary to turn tail and run on the Gray amendment. Listed among the Democratic defectors instead are Fred Bosse of Houston, Vilma Luna of Corpus Christi, Paul Sadler of Henderson, and most mysteriously of all, Ron Wilson of Houston. (Wilson told the Observer he didn't want to make a bad bill more passable. The next day, he lamely but perhaps predictably offered his own bypass amendment, to allow established clergy members as surrogate parents. But the game was already lost.) Any two of those supposedly solid Democratic votes could have reversed the vote as it occurred; and if joined by just Wolens and one other Member (or if necessary, Speaker Laney himself), the Democrats could have turned back any Republican betrayal - agreement or no agreement. More importantly, they could have kept young women out of the cross-hairs of the anti-abortion movement. "Members are very concerned about the 2000 elections," Austin Democrat Elliott Naishtat said soberly in the wake of the vote. "They were paying more attention to reelection issues than to the ultimate impact of what we were doing on young pregnant girls in Texas."

It is difficult to ignore the fact that while the Dem leadership says it is protecting the Party's House majority, it is reluctant to use that majority when it most needs to. It allowed sanctimonious appeals to "parental rights" to trump not only young women's rights, but even the abundantly obvious circumstantial exceptions among many families - all in the service of an openly right-wing agenda and the Bush presidential priorities. "For the leadership," said Harold Dutton, "the vote was apparently based not on the merits of the bill, but out of some political consideration for conservative Democrats. But a lot of them vote like Republicans anyway, so I'm not sure what that does to the Democratic majority."

Dutton and the other opponents remain vaguely hopeful that the bill as amended will not survive a court challenge, but they also expect the emboldened abortion foes to return to the Lege in two years with renewed energy. And while they are reluctant to criticize the leadership directly, it is clear that they feel they were abandoned in this fight, even tricked into believing that the leadership was promising support it was not truly committed to deliver. Norma Chávez of El Paso described the final bill as based on a narrow, shortsighted, and ethnocentric concept of the family: "It was very backward ... and it sends a very horrible message to women, and to teens." In the immediate aftermath of the defeat, Chávez proposed what she herself described as a "crazy amendment" - to require state support of any unwanted child born as a consequence of S.B. 30 - and says she will refine it and bring it back to the next session. And she remains angry at the surrender of her fellow Democrats. "I don't know why we didn't try to continue to amend the bill, and send the Governor something he really needed to look at. Instead, we conceded, and I don't know why."