Texas lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday allowing private citizens to sue abortion pill manufacturers, doctors and anyone who mails the drug into the state.
The Texas state Senate voted 17-8 in favor of HB 7 – the “Woman and Child Protection Act — which cleared the House last week. The measure, yet to be signed by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, would add another layer to the state’s abortion restrictions, including limits on medication abortions, which account for nearly two-thirds of abortions performed each year.
Texas law prohibits physicians or medical suppliers from providing any abortion-inducing drugs by delivery or mail service. If HB 7 is signed into law, private citizens could sue and receive up to $100,000 in cases of successful lawsuits, according to the bill text. If the plaintiff is not directly related to the fetus, they would be allowed to keep 10% of the damages, while the rest would go to a charity of their choice.
Women who take the abortion pills cannot be sued under the bill.
“Texas Right to Life has worked with lawmakers since November to create the most effective Pro-Life defense against out-of-state companies and activists that send abortion pills to Texas,” Texas Right to Life President John Seago said in a statement. “This trend is killing tens of thousands of babies a year and harming their mothers, but today, our law became a blueprint for the rest of the country.”
One in four abortions at the end of 2024 were conducted using abortion pills mailed to patients, according to a report by the Society of Family Planning. Nearly half of those mail-order abortions were prescribed to women living in areas with abortion restrictions, like Texas, by doctors operating out of so-called “shield law” states.
Twenty-two states and Washington, D.C. have some form of shield law on their books, which protects abortion providers from prosecution or extradition for violating other states’ abortion laws, allowing them to mail abortion pills into states where they are banned, according to UCLA Law.
Authorities in Texas and Louisiana have launched cases against a New York-based doctor accused of illegally prescribing abortion pills across state lines, including to a minor in Louisiana. However, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has invoked her state’s shield law to block the extradition of the doctor, according to the Louisiana Illuminator.
Fifteen Republican-led states, including Texas, signed a letter in late July calling on Congress to ban shield laws, arguing they interfere with states’ ability to enforce abortion restrictions.
Demonstrating the ease of obtaining abortion drugs, the Daily Caller News Foundation recently purchased multiple sets of medication simply by completing online forms created by providers, without speaking to a physician or confirming a pregnancy.
Moreover, reports of mail-order abortion pills being used to trick women into ending the lives of their unborn children have been on the rise. An Illinois man was charged Aug. 23 with two counts of intentional homicide of an unborn child for giving the abortion drug mifepristone to his pregnant girlfriend without her knowledge, according to local reports.
Abortion advocates and providers, including Planned Parenthood, claim abortion drugs are safer than common medications like Tylenol. However, a peer-reviewed study from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute found no scientifically valid basis for the comparison. The study traced the popular claim back to a 2003 Chicago Tribune article in which a doctor compared mifepristone’s death rate to an uncited penicillin death rate.
A separate study of insurance data by the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that nearly 11% of women suffered a “serious adverse event” after taking the abortion pill — including hemorrhage, sepsis, fallopian tube rupture or infection — compared to the summary figure of “less than 0.5%” reported on the drug’s label.
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