“People are beginning to see the importance of that bench,” said Gina Ortiz Jones, founder of the Find Out PAC.
This article was originally published by COURIER Texas, as “Gina Ortiz Jones’ crusade to elect 3 Democrats to the Texas Supreme Court.”
Gina Ortiz Jones is on a mission—one that may be her most challenging yet. And that’s saying something for the former under secretary of the Air Force, who served under President Joe Biden until March 2023.
“The Texas Supreme Court took our freedoms. And what we need to do about it in November is vote out Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine and Jane Bland,” she told COURIER Texas.
Jones said she’s confident that “people are very motivated to hold somebody accountable” for their loss of reproductive rights in Texas, and that flipping three seats on the state Supreme Court may not be as difficult as it seems.
“When people say, ‘Oh, that’s really tough’—well how do we know?” she said. “We’ve never tried.”
Indeed, it’s been 30 years since a Democrat has served on the Lone Star State’s top court. If Jones is successful in helping to elect even one of the Democratic judges running for the bench—DaSean Jones, Christine Weems and Bonnie Lee Goldstein—it will be historic.
The San Antonio resident told COURIER Texas that she was propelled into action after the Texas Supreme Court ruled in December 2023 that Kate Cox, a pregnant mother of two whose fetus suffered from a fatal genetic disorder, didn’t qualify for an abortion under the state’s ban.
“I just remember reading the six or seven pages of the Kate Cox opinion, and I thought, you don’t have to be a lawyer to know that those folks are just blowing smoke up your dress,” she said of the state Supreme Court justices.
“And certainly as I was reading that opinion, I was like, this isn’t right,” she said. “Who are these folks, who are elected judges, to tell this woman that they know more than her doctor?”
The nine justices currently seated on the Texas Supreme Court are all Republicans. Since 2021, when the Texas Legislature passed the Texas Heartbeat Act—banning abortion after the first detection of embryonic activity, which is earlier than most women know they’re pregnant—they’ve ruled on a number of reproductive health-related cases that have made women’s health care increasingly more dangerous throughout the state.
This year, Jones decided enough was enough. She launched the Find Out PAC—as in, “f*ck around and find out”—to inform voters about their power to free themselves from the red wall of judges blocking Texans’ reproductive rights.
“The real tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way,” Jones said. “We have the answer. All we have to do is vote.”
Could It Work? It Did In Wisconsin.
Right now, Texas has nine state Supreme Court justices who are all Republicans. (See the next section for more information about their backgrounds and positions on reproductive freedom.) They’re all elected to six-year terms on a rotating schedule. This year, three justices are up for reelection. Three more will be on the ballot in 2026.
Without a sweeping turnover of the Texas Legislature, attorney general’s office and governor’s office, chipping away at the state Supreme Court’s partisan majority is voters’ best chance to slow the assault on reproductive rights.
“Wisconsin shows us the prize,” Jones said.
Despite having a Republican majority in their legislature, Wisconsin voters elected Democrats to the state Supreme Court, finally reaching a Democratic majority for the first time in 15 years with the addition of Judge Janet Protasiewicz in 2023.
Since then, the state’s high court has rolled back an 1849 abortion ban. They also ruled that voters deserved new, non-gerrymandered electoral maps, which will be in effect for the Nov. 5 election.
“That’s what we need to do here,” said Jones, who hopes that eventually with a Democratic majority in the Texas Supreme Court, the judges could undo the highly gerrymandered electoral maps in the state, too.
How Important Is It?
Texas is home to 7 million women between the ages of 15 and 49—largely considered the average span of reproductive health, though the average age that a child gets her period today is 12. That’s important for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that in the 16 months after the 2021 abortion ban was passed, there were more than 26,000 rape-related pregnancies reported in Texas.
Prior to 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, teen births had dropped by 67 percent both in Texas and nationally. Since 2022, however, they’ve gone up in Texas.
Since Texas’ abortion ban went into effect, infant deaths have risen by 255 per year—and the rate of maternal deaths has increased 56 percent.
Texas women whose dangerous pregnancies led to an abortion recommendation, and who were delayed just nine days in getting those abortions, developed severe complications nearly 60 percent of the time, according to a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. That’s almost twice the rate of patients in other states.
Texas women have been found bleeding out from miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and suffering from near-deadly sepsis infections, because under state law they can’t be treated until fetal heartbeats disappear, or the patients themselves are dying.
Doctors face up to 99 years in jail, a $100,000 fine, and a loss of their medical license for performing an abortion on a woman who is not at risk of death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
Women in Texas are increasingly going without prenatal care, and the OB-GYN workforce is leaving Texas in droves.
Meet the Judges
Jones’ goal is to help at least the 49 percent of Texans who believe that the state’s abortion law should be less strict to get out and vote for the three Democratic judges running for state Supreme Court.
Democrat Christine Weems is a sitting judge on the 281st Civil Judicial District Court of Harris County. She’s endorsed by EMILYs List, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News and a long list of Texas organizations and politicians.
She’s running against incumbent Justice John Phillip Devine, who was first elected to the state Supreme Court in 2012. He brags about being arrested 37 times at antiabortion protests, has served 34 days in jail for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic, and has blasted legal challenges to Texas’ abortion laws as “a mockery of God.” Devine has also spoken out against the separation of church and state, and has suggested that Democrats will cheat in the 2024 presidential election to prevent Donald Trump from winning.
Democrat DaSean Jones was the first combat veteran and minority to preside over the 180th Criminal District Court of Texas. He served two tours in Iraq, and continues to serve as an Army Reserve officer. He said it’s important to “achieve equilibrium” on the Texas Supreme Court, and cites abortion and voting rights as two areas that need a broader perspective.
His opponent, incumbent Justice Jimmy Blacklock, was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2018, who praised Blacklock saying, “I don’t have to guess or wonder how Justice Blacklock is going to decide cases because of his proven record of fighting for pro-life causes.”
Democrat Bonnie Lee Goldstein is a justice on the 5th District Court of Appeals, Place 3, in Dallas—the largest appellate court in Texas. Prior to her service there, she presided over the 44th Civil District Court in Dallas County.
She’s running against incumbent Justice Jane Bland, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion dismissing 20 Texas women who were seriously harmed by the state’s abortion ban. The women were suing the state of Texas, asking for the court to clarify the law preventing doctors from intervening to save a pregnant woman’s life by providing an abortion. That law was written lacking clear directions about when providers are able to step in—and it’s what led to the women’s horrific and tragic medical experiences. Bland wrote the opinion refusing their appeal for clarity.
“A lot of time has passed [since the first ban was enacted in 2021], so it’s hard to meet somebody that doesn’t know somebody or wasn’t themselves impacted by this,” Jones said. “I even know somebody at my church who had a miscarriage and unfortunately was denied a D&C (dilation and curettage procedure) initially because her life wasn’t at risk.
“This is not something that is going to fix itself.”
Jones is optimistic that she can get Texas voters to fix the situation. She herself was highly successful in fixing a number of Air Force policies when she was the under secretary in the Biden administration.
Who Is Gina Ortiz Jones?
Jones said that she related to Kate Cox’s situation because, as an “out lesbian woman of color,” she’s also experienced injustices in her own life.
The daughter of immigrants said she served under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy, “so I was willing to die for my country. But my country was not ready for me to serve openly. And so I think every time I see these injustices and I can do something about it, then I think it behooves me to do that.”
It’s an approach to life that the Find Out PAC founder learned from her mom Victorina, who came to America from the Philippines because she believed so strongly in the American Dream.
Jones said that her mom had a saying: “When something wasn’t right, she would do something about it. And that’s been a powerful example for me throughout life.”
It’s an attitude that propelled her into service for the country beginning when she earned a four-year Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship.
After graduating from college, she became an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force, where she was deployed to Iraq. After three years of active duty, she reached the rank of captain.
She later joined the United States Africa Command, and then moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where she was a special advisor to the deputy director. Finally, she served as a director in the office of the United States Trade Representative, and continued that work into the Donald Trump administration.
“As a civil servant, you’re apolitical,” she said. “So I wanted to see, frankly, what good I could do from within.”
But after six months, she left.
“Some of the folks that were appointed to the administration were not interested in service or the public, much less public service,” she said.
Jones wanted to find a new way to serve, and that calling turned into two campaigns to run for Congress as a Democrat in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, her home district—in 2017 and 2019—both of which she narrowly lost.
Now, she sees that the most consequential way for her to serve the women and families of Texas is by effecting change on the Texas Supreme Court, which has refused in key decisions to help preserve the lives, health and fertility of Texas women.
“People are beginning to see the importance of that bench,” she said.
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