It’s safe to say that Facebook posts from the Parker County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office probably do not normally get much traction outside of Parker County. But when a post is a stealth announcement of Texas’ newest attack on abortion disguised as a true crime story about a bad boyfriend, that thing is going to have legs.
Monday’s Facebook post announced the arrest of Justin Anthony Banta, a 38-year-old IT employee at the U.S. Department of Justice. Banta is alleged to have slipped drugs into his then-girlfriend’s coffee to terminate her pregnancy.
That seems bad! Banta seems like a scuzzy dude, and it’s probably good that Parker County Sheriff Russ Authier wanted everyone to know that Banta assaulted his ex-girlfriend by secretly giving her drugs!
Except for the part where Banta isn’t charged with harming his ex-girlfriend, a fully-grown autonomous human being, at all. No, this Facebook post is only concerned with announcing the charges against Banta for harm to a six-week-old embryo. And for that, he’s been slapped with a capital murder charge.
Banta might be a run-of-the-mill abuser, but his abusive behavior is now the backstop for Texas’ latest anti-choice innovation. Because for Banta to be charged with murder, he has to have ended the life of a human being.
Conservatives in Texas and throughout the country have been pushing for fetuses to be considered people for quite some time. The concept of “fetal personhood” says that from the moment of conception, the fertilized egg has full rights, which means that any termination, at any stage, is murder.
That idea would bar all abortions, but it’s worse than that: It arguably grants the fetus more rights than the pregnant person, as their behavior can now be surveilled and controlled, because that fetus doesn’t just have the right not to be murdered—it has the right not to be harmed. It’s the reasoning behind prosecuting pregnant women for drug use and attempts to ban in vitro fertilization. Charging Banta with capital murder is part of this push.
This might seem like an unduly cynical reading of the sheriff’s statement, but the rest of the post is also chock-full of anti-choice rhetoric disguised as the juicy results of a criminal investigation.
According to the sheriff, when Banta’s former girlfriend told him she was pregnant, he said he would cover the cost of an abortion, and suggested they order “the ‘Plan C’ online.”
First, no one refers to medication abortion drugs routinely as “Plan C.” Plan C is a website that provides information on how to access abortion pills by mail. The website even explains that medication abortion can be a two-drug protocol—a mifepristone pill followed by misoprostol pills 24 to 48 hours later—or misoprostol alone. The omission of any information detailing which drug(s) Banta used shows that this isn’t a remotely serious report of the facts underpinning Banta’s murder charge. Instead, it’s a way to link Plan C, an entirely legal website, with murder.
The statement also says that when the victim was roughly six weeks pregnant, “she went for a sonogram, where she learned the baby had a strong heartbeat, displayed good vital signs and was said to be healthy by her doctor.”
So, no one can go “for” a sonogram. The sonogram is the picture created by an ultrasound, which is the actual procedure. Is the sheriff of Parker County, Texas, required to understand this distinction? Generally not, save for when he’s announcing that someone is facing capital murder charges based on these facts.
Related | The horrific way conservatives are trying to redefine who’s a person
Let’s pretend Sheriff Russ meant to say ultrasound. What about that strong heartbeat? There’s no such thing as a fetal heartbeat at six weeks because there is no heart yet. At that point, the embryo has developed a tube that generates electrical impulses, which is the so-called “heartbeat” that is detected.
Displayed good vital signs? That embryo is less than one-half inch in size at that point. This is bog-standard anti-choice misinformation, and it’s there for a reason. It’s not at all necessary to explain Banta’s wrongdoing—slipping your girlfriend abortion drugs is a crime not because they are abortion drugs and not because of the gestational age of the fetus, but because it is a crime to secretly give people controlled drugs.
But wait, there’s more. The post also states that the victim reported she experienced “extreme fatigue and heavy bleeding” and had to go to the emergency room, which makes whatever drugs she was slipped sound very scary indeed. Conservatives desperately want mifepristone outlawed, but they’re stuck with the fact that it is exceedingly safe. Here, it isn’t surprising that the victim would have been scared by bleeding and gone to the ER, because she didn’t know she’d been given a drug. But the lack of any further detail about that medical experience just leaves the reader with the impression that abortion drugs make you bleed uncontrollably and end up in the hospital.
Despite that explanation, Banta isn’t on the hook for the harm he caused his ex-girlfriend. The explanation of the physical harm to her is provided to justify charging Banta for harming the embryo. It’s tough to think of a more stark example of what fetal personhood looks like in practice: the full weight of the state brought to bear to protect an embryo while ignoring actual harm to the pregnant woman.
Perhaps the worst part of a statement that is brimming with bad things is the sheriff’s thank you list to all the agencies that helped out: “Parker County Sheriff’s Office Investigators, the Texas Rangers, Benbrook Police, Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Digital Forensic and Technical Services, the U.S. Secret Service, the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (ROCIC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).” Oh, and also, you can’t learn anything more about the case yet—including the woman’s identity or how authorities determined that drugs were indeed slipped into her coffee—because the investigation is ongoing.
That is an awful lot of law enforcement partnerships for a creep who assaulted his girlfriend. Regrettably, it would even be an awful lot of law enforcement partnerships if Banta had murdered his girlfriend. It is not, however, an awful lot of law enforcement partnerships for a full-throated assault on medication abortion. Investigating Banta looks a lot like a stepping stone for Texas to build a case against medication abortion providers, a case it has long wanted to make.
And in the end, the person who was pregnant, the person who was assaulted, is nothing but an afterthought.