The Supreme Court of Texas stayed the order that would have allowed a woman to abort a very high risk pregnancy last night. Here’s a short bio of one of the Justices, who happens to be a radical anti-abortion zealot who calls himself “The Ten Commandments Judge.”
John Devine has long been a staunch anti-abortion activist. At a June rally in Fort Worth, Devine told the crowd he had been arrested 37 times while protesting abortion clinics in the 1980s, Smith reported. Though, in a more recent interview, “he said he had been arrested during peaceful protests several times in the 1980s but did not remember how many,” Smith reported. Despite this history of activism, Devine insisted he “is still able to interpret the law impartially.”
In 2008, Devine and his wife, Nubia, showed everyone just how committed they were to the pro-life position when her seventh pregnancy endangered her life and that of the baby. The Texas Observer‘s Emily DePrang wrote about a video his campaign put out called “Elizabeth’s story.”
It documents the birth of his seventh child, Elizabeth, which his wife carried to term despite the fact that the fetus had a condition likely to kill her. She survived, and the baby died an hour later. The video opens, “What if your beliefs were so powerful, they allowed you to fearlessly risk your life for the life of your unborn child?” and concludes, “Though Elizabeth died only an hour after she was born, her life began at conception.”
That line about “fearlessly risking your life” for a child that has no chance of life is just stunning. They truly believe that a woman must be willing to die to ensure that her fatally damaged fetus can emerge from the womb and die an hour later. It’s pretty clear that these people don’t value women as anything more than a birthing vessel. It’s sickeningly grotesque.