Texas lawmakers again consider punishments for women who abort

The day Texas state Rep. Brent Money filed a bill that would apply the state’s homicide laws to abortion cases, more than a dozen House lawmakers signed on as co-authors, Money said. That’s the most support the controversial legislation—which would open the door to prosecuting women for murder for having abortions—has ever received among lawmakers in the state since a Texas representative first introduced a similar bill in 2017. That year, the bill’s author gained 11 co-authors.

But support in the House waned during the three biannual sessions that followed that first bill. In 2019, the bill had six authors and co-authors. In 2021, the number was down to five. In 2023, only two names were on the bill. In all those years, only once did the bill receive a hearing. It has never come to a vote—either in a committee or in the full House.

That could be the story again this year, but the bill’s backers say legislation protecting the lives of unborn babies with the same laws that protect humans after they are born is seeing more support than ever before. The Texas bill would remove portions of the state homicide code that exempt mothers from prosecution for the deaths of their unborn children. That provision would override the state’s existing abortion laws, which also shield women from prosecution for aborting their babies.

While most mainstream pro-life groups openly oppose prosecuting mothers, even a leading Texas pro-life group says the bill has its merits but not enough to outweigh the concerns.

Rep. Money is still gathering signatures and has not submitted the bill’s final co-author sheet. He said the support he has received excites him, but he doesn’t expect the legislation to pass this session. Lobbyist Paul Brown with Abolish Abortion Texas, the main group backing the bill, said the election of Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows over his opponent, the more conservative Rep. David Cook, made the bill’s success even less likely. But Brown acknowledged Burrows could surprise the bill’s backers by allowing them to prioritize the legislation.

“More important to me is I want the conversation about equal protection to become more mainstream,” Money said. “And so I’m far more interested in having lengthy conversations with lawmakers that are already pro-life, they love the Lord, and they just haven’t engaged this exactly.”

Money said his recent acceptance of the strategy of deterring women from aborting their babies by making it illegal, known as abolitionism, gives him more patience with lawmakers who are still considering the subject. He said he has been pro-life for a long time. Money’s wife worked at a pro-life pregnancy center. They’ve served as foster parents and have adopted children. But it wasn’t until he connected with Brown after announcing his run for office that Money questioned what he called “the Republican pro-life orthodoxy” of seeing all mothers who have abortions as victims and not accountable for the deaths of their children.

The influence of that ideology in the Texas legislature, Brown said, led to the decreasing number of sponsors since Abolish Abortion Texas’ first bill in 2017.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, a pro-life law took effect in Texas that made it impossible for abortion facilities to operate legally in the state. Most had already halted abortions the year before, when the state’s innovative heartbeat law took effect. Since then, lobbyists at Abolish Abortion Texas have been working to educate lawmakers about the ongoing shipment of abortion pills to the homes of Texas women.

Brown said that work is paying off. In general, he said, lawmakers are no longer surprised to hear that elective abortions are still happening in Texas even though the state’s abortion data shows otherwise.

“The idea of incrementalism is not really available in Texas anymore,” Money said, referring to the strategy of enacting increasingly stronger protections for unborn babies over time. “We have one remaining loophole that allows abortion. That’s it. And that is self-induced abortions. And so if we will close that loophole, then abortion will be completely illegal in Texas.” He acknowledged that illegal abortions would still continue in the state.

Brown said abolitionist legislation is gaining momentum not only in Texas but also nationwide. Abortion abolition lobbyists expect to see lawmakers in about 20 states introduce similar legislation—more than ever before in one year, according to numbers on the Foundation to Abolish Abortion website.

John Seago, president of the state’s National Right to Life affiliate, Texas Right to Life, agreed that more Texas lawmakers are coming out in support of abolitionist bills. And while his organization has opposed such legislation in the past, he said it did not in 2023 and would still not oppose the bill this year.

He attributed the shift to a change in the legislation. Before 2023, abolitionist bills proposed repealing existing pro-life laws on the books. The bills this year and in 2023 allowed those laws to remain, although supporters say the legislation would make the existing abortion laws unnecessary.

Seago said he appreciates that the bill helps raise awareness that abortions are still happening in the state. But he said Texas Right to Life would not prioritize or lobby for the abolitionist bill.

“I do not think that bill is an effective tool to actually stop abortion pills from being mailed into Texas,” Seago said. He pointed to human trafficking, child pornography, and the opioid crisis as examples of other societal evils that thrive even when they’re illegal. “Criminalizing something does not actually stop it,” he said. “We actually need to adopt effective tools to go after the people that are promoting it, the people that are selling it, the people that are making money off of these evils.”

Voicing another concern, he said that some lawmakers don’t seem to understand the severity of punishment that the bill mandates in the majority of abortion cases. Women could face life in prison without parole or the death penalty if convicted.

“It’s not as if a judge and a jury get to just decide whether it’s six months in jail or whether it’s capital punishment,” he said. “No, they have a pretty narrow scope, based on how this is drafted, of what they can rule on and what they do sentence.”

As a National Right to Life affiliate, Texas Right to Life’s neutral stance on an abolitionist bill is unusual. In many states, mainstream pro-life groups are among the most vocal opponents of such legislation. Texas Right to Life was the only one out of 49 state affiliates listed on the National Right to Life website that did not sign a 2022 open letter in opposition to a bill in Louisiana that became the first abolitionist measure ever to pass out of a committee in any state. In that letter, the groups said they do not support any measures that would allow women to be punished for abortions.

“I think that’s imprudent,” Seago said. “The reality is, if abortion is murder, if abortion is the intentional taking of an innocent human being’s life, we have to take that seriously in the criminal context. We can’t ignore that. And unfortunately, some of our pro-life friends have tried to write this policy question off and say, ‘Oh, we will never have that conversation.’ ... We need to have the conversation. We need to examine, what is the proper response here?”