Davis said she would have supported a bill that included only a 20-week ban. Davis says she'd back 20-week ban

After leading a 13-hour filibuster against an omnibus abortion bill last June, Texas Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis now says that she would support a 20-week ban on abortion that pays more deference to a woman and her doctor.

She said she would have supported a bill that included only a 20-week ban, but that the other provisions — restrictions on abortion providers and clinics — majorly obstructed access to the procedure.


“It was the least objectionable,” Davis told The Dallas Morning News regarding a bill that contained the 20-week ban. “I would have and could have voted to allow that to go through, if I felt like we had tightly defined the ability for a woman and a doctor to be making this decision together and not have the Legislature get too deep in the weeds of how we would describe when that was appropriate.”

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The current ban provides exemptions for fetal abnormalities and cases in which the mother’s life is in danger, but Davis said those provisions do not go far enough.

“My concern, even in the way the 20-week ban was written in this particular bill, was that it didn’t give enough deference between a woman and her doctor making this difficult decision, and instead tried to legislatively define what it was,” Davis told the paper.

President of anti-abortion organization Susan B. Anthony List Marjorie Dannenfelser said that Davis’s pivot signals “political desperation.”

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“Most Americans…are moving towards compassionate, common ground limits [on abortion]. Only political desperation could cause Davis to try to give the appearance of moving with them, while at the same time maintaining abortion as her ‘sacred ground,’ and eviscerating the goals of the legislation,” Dannenfelser said in a statement.

Davis spokeswoman Rebecca Acuna said Davis’s stance is not new. “It’s not new information,” Acuna said. “She has often talked about this in her speeches.”

Davis’s Republican opponent for in the Texas governor’s race state Attorney General Greg Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.