AUSTIN (LifeSiteNews) — The Texas Senate has passed a plan to stop out-of-state abortion pills from being used to undermine Texas’s strong pro-life laws, and is now pending before the Texas House State Affairs Committee.

SB 2880 would make it illegal to “manufacture, possess, or distribute an abortion-inducing drug in this state”; “mail, transport, deliver, prescribe, or provide an abortion-inducing drug in any manner to or from any person or location in this state”; “provide information on the method for obtaining an abortion-inducing drug”; “create, edit, upload, publish, host, maintain, or register a domain name for an Internet website, platform, or other interactive computer service that assists or facilitates a person ’s effort in obtaining an abortion-inducing drug”; “create, edit, program, or distribute any application or software for use on a computer or an electronic device that is intended to enable individuals to obtain an abortion-inducing drug or to facilitate an individual ’s access to an abortion-inducing drug”; or “engage in conduct that aids or abets an act described by this subsection.”

The vast majority of abortions are illegal in Texas, but the state is still dealing with the problem of out-of-state actors using pills to circumvent Texas law, facilitating abortions that take place completely in private. Earlier this year, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York abortionist for mailing abortion-inducing drugs into the state, securing an order to impose a $100,000 fine.

The bill passed the Texas Senate on April 30, and subsequently went before the State Affairs committee in the next chamber.

“A woman a few weeks ago came into our clinic, and her boyfriend had ordered abortion pills online and given them to her, unknowingly. She’s no longer pregnant, even though this child was very wanted. That is not health care,” testified Whitney Freeman, director of medical services for Prestonwood Pregnancy Center. “We had another woman a few weeks ago whose fever was 104 degrees for over a week, and the hospital told her that that could be a normal symptom of pregnancy and sent her home, because she was told not to tell them that she had attempted to self-manage abortion. That is not health care. Trauma does not fix trauma.”

“A local college student came to us after taking the abortion pill … She took them alone in her dorm room, believing what the abortion websites told her, that it would be easy, safe, and over quickly,” added Katlyn Marburger, executive director of Brenham and Bryan Pregnancy Center. “But within hours, she was in severe pain, bleeding heavily, and had to be rushed to the ER by ambulance.”

Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via pill distribution, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.

The abortion lobby has made unregulated, no-oversight pill distribution key to the cause of perpetuating abortion-on-demand regardless of the risks to the women they are purportedly serving.

In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says that mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.” 

This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”

“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”

SB 2880 would complement another bill proposed last month, the Woman and Child Protection Act, which would empower any parent of a preborn child killed by an abortion-inducing drug to bring civil action against anyone involved in its manufacture or distribution or who provided information on obtaining it.