New York’s Hochul, de Blasio, Adams rail against Texas abortion law in Brooklyn

New York Daily News, The (NY)

Gov. Hochul joined a raucous Brooklyn rally Thursday to push back against a draconian new anti-abortion ban in Texas that allows anyone in that state to report health care providers they suspect of providing the procedure.

The law, which went into effect Wednesday and is the strictest in the country, bans abortions after a heartbeat is detected in the fetus — or about six weeks into pregnancy. It also essentially deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who provides an abortion or “aids and abets” one and would provide for them to receive $10,000 rewards if they win.

Hochul, New York State’s first female governor, railed against the new measures, saying they would lead to the dangerous “back-alley” abortions of the past and vowed to “help lead the nation in this fight.”

“Right now, we have oppression going on in our country when people are trying to tell women what to do with their own bodies,” Hochul, who’s Catholic, said to cheers. “Keep your damn hands off our bodies! We are sick and tired!”

The U.S. Justice Department sued Texas over the law Thursday, arguing that it is unconstitutional, but that fight is almost certain to drag on for months.

Hochul highlighted the political challenges pro-choice advocates now face in the days ahead and pointed to her past, running for local office and Congress in a conservative part of upstate New York, as both a prescriptive and cautionary tale for others living in more right-leaning, anti-abortion parts of the country.

“I was told in this very conservative community if I didn’t take the right-to-life political line that I would never get elected in a million years — and I said, ‘Well, watch this,’” she said. “I would not touch that line. I ran for office and I won overwhelmingly time and time and time again.”

Hochul acknowledged, though, that it wasn’t all winning and blamed losing her old Congressional seat on supporting the right to contraception in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — a stance she said she’d take again.

“This is a fight that I thought ended when my mother was starting out as a parent, as a young person,” she said. “I had no idea that all these years later we’d be fighting the same fight that grandma and my mom fought and my own daughter now has her own rights threatened by crazy people in places like Texas.”

Hochul was joined by dozens of pro-choice activists at the Planned Parenthood rally in Brooklyn, as well as by Mayor de Blasio, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who’s the Democratic nominee for mayor and is expected to win that contest this November.

Both de Blasio and Williams are mulling potential runs for governor against Hochul next year.

Williams — who’s expressed personal pro-life views in the past, but supports the right to choose — pilloried conservatives for pushing the Texas abortion ban, accusing them of hypocrisy.

“One of the things that p---es me off the most is that they’ve stolen the word called pro-life,” he said. “They are not pro-life. They don’t give a s--- about life once it’s here. They put a bounty — $10,000 — a bounty on someone who tries to get an abortion or goes to an abortion clinic, but won’t give $10,000 to a single mother trying to survive right now, a single mother being evicted.”

De Blasio framed the Texas law as “unconscionable” and “an attempt to subjugate” women and said “we cannot let that stand.”

“This is going to take a fight,” he said. “This is going to be a moment for militancy, everyone, because you cannot have your government attempt to take away your right to control your body. It cannot happen in America. We have to fight it, every one of us.”