“A Texas Democrat called this year’s state legislature the most misogynistic she’s seen in her 21 years as a state representative, following a house vote that would have ended legal abortion care for pregnant Texans whose fetuses have medical anomalies that aren’t survivable outside the womb.

““Women are leaders of their families, whether some men in this room do not recognize that,” said state Rep. Jessica Farrar (D-Houston) in a pointed speech criticizing her male Republican colleagues for not supporting a bill that would expand access to breastfeeding and instead focusing on limiting access to legal abortion care.

“Farrar took to the microphone after a debate about how best to retool the state’s social safety net turned to abortion, with a freshman Tea Party lawmaker attempting to insert an abortion ban into a bill concerning the bureaucratic operations of the Texas Department of State Health Services.

“Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler) put forward an amendment that would make it illegal to terminate a pregnancy after 20 weeks, even if a fetus “has a severe and irreversible abnormality,” effectively forcing families with wanted, but unsustainable pregnancies to carry to term at the behest of the state and against the advice of their doctors or their own wishes.

“Schaefer said, during debate over his amendment, that suffering is “part of the human condition, since sin entered the world.” Even some Republican lawmakers opposed Schaefer’s proposal, casting it as a cruel and unnecessary intrusion into the lives of grieving Texans. Rep. J.D. Sheffield (R-Gatesville), a medical doctor, said: “Why should the heavy, blunt hand of the government come into that most heartrending decision?”

“Schaefer’s amendment passed, briefly, before state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (D-San Antonio) filed a legislative point of order that prompted the bill’s sponsor to pull down the entire piece of legislation for review.

Asked to comment on his proposal, Schaefer told Newslo that “the majority of girls and women today take sex lightly, knowing that there’s a safety net in the form of legal abortion. That needs to be remedied.”

“In order to truly make a better world, we must first change ourselves,” he said. “And since people are certainly not going to give up having sex, they must be made to enjoy it more responsibly. My amendment was just a starting point for an entire set of legal measures that were designed to make people more careful. It might sound a bit cruel, but it gets the job done, I can guarantee that.”

He also added: “Not to mention that women in general have a tendency to seduce men. That’s another part of the problem my proposal was set to tackle. Playing with someone and misleading them is never a good thing to do, and tends to have a lot of consequences. Many of those consequences aren’t very pleasant. There’s a lesson to be learned here.”