Texas bill would allow lawsuits over shipping abortion pills

This story was produced in partnership with CBS News.

Republican lawmakers in Texas have opened a new front in their efforts to crack down on abortion, this time with a bill that would enable lawsuits targeting the use of medication to terminate pregnancies. Their proposal would also take aim at shield laws in other states that protect manufacturers and the doctors who prescribe abortion pills.

In Texas, it is already illegal to knowingly mail, carry, or deliver abortion-inducing drugs. It is also illegal for a doctor not licensed in the state of Texas to prescribe abortion medication.

Now, in the midst of an already controversial special legislative session, lawmakers have reintroduced a bill that would allow lawsuits to target anyone who manufactures, mails, delivers, prescribes, or distributes abortion pills. The bill would also permit people to file a wrongful death lawsuit if the medication results in harm or death of a fetus or the mother, within a statute of limitations up to six years. 

“These are the pills that are being mailed into Texas directly to women, often without instructions, certainly without doctors as before, and without follow-up care after,” the bill’s sponsor, Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican, told the Texas Tribune earlier this year. “This is illegal in Texas, but is taking place, and we’ve thus far not been able to protect women.”

The World Health Organization says the pills—a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol—can be safely prescribed for women to self-administer at home, without the direct supervision of a health care provider, in the first trimester. 

Hughes previously sponsored a state law, passed in 2021, banning abortions at six weeks, or when a “fetal heartbeat” is detected. 

The new proposal, known as the Women and Child Protection Act, is expected to be heard in committee in the Texas State Senate during Monday’s special session. An earlier version stalled in the House during the most recent legislative session.

The bill also seeks to route any challenges into federal court, and includes language aimed at neutralizing the force of so-called shield laws in other states, designed to protect doctors who prescribe abortion medication from states without bans. 

“Texas continues to try to meddle in the provision of safe, legal, and affordable reproductive health care nationwide,” says Julie Kay, the former executive director for the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine. “Telemedicine abortion is a modern and effective way to provide care.”

At the same time, former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, who led the push for the state’s current abortion restrictions, has announced a lawsuit filed on behalf of a Texas woman who alleges the father of the child she was expecting slipped abortion medication into her hot chocolate, leading her to lose her pregnancy. 

Similar to the proposed legislation, this lawsuit targets shield laws in other states meant to protect physicians who provided the abortion pills in the plaintiff’s case. The lawsuit is filed in federal court and names a nonprofit group that the plaintiff claims helped the father obtain medication, Aid Access, which is based in the Netherlands.

According to the civil lawsuit, the father “obtained these drugs from Aid Access, a criminal organization that illegally ships abortion pills into Texas and other jurisdictions where abortion has been outlawed.” 

Aid Access and the father have not been criminally charged. 

On its website, Aid Access says it has facilitated over 200,000 online abortions to women in the US since 2018. In some cases, the group relies on telemedicine shield laws, such as ones enacted in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, and Washington, to fulfill orders and mail them to recipients in states with bans.

Aid Access founder Dr. Rebecca Gomperts previously told CBS News the service is legal in all the jurisdictions in which it operates.

“Where I work from, it’s legal to prescribe the medications. And so I’ll do that. And the pharmacy that I refer to is allowed to mail the medicines, on a prescription of a doctor, to the women. So (the Texas law) has no impact on what we do,” Gomperts said.

Aid Access and the father have not responded to the filing as of Monday morning. 

Jonathan Mitchell declined to comment for this story. 

Haley Ott contributed reporting.