New bill would trap women who want or need abortions in Texas

The legislation, which passed the state Senate in April, also allows women and their loved ones who help them get abortions — here or in another state — to be jailed and sued.

Lauren Miller, a Dallas mom, was 15 weeks pregnant with twins when she fled the state of Texas to get a single fetal abortion to save the life of her healthy twin son.

Tragically, Lauren had learned a couple of weeks previously during a routine ultrasound that one of her much-wanted sons, Thomas, suffered from a rare fatal genetic condition called Trisomy 18. The diagnosis meant that he would most likely die in her womb, or very shortly after birth.

Thomas had developed with only half a brain, major heart issues, and other genetic abnormalities. “It was not survivable,” Lauren tells Courier Texas. 

She discovered that only a procedure called a single fetal abortion could save the life of her healthy twin, Henry.

“The risk of miscarriage with a Trisomy 18 baby is so severe that I could have lost both babies,” Lauren explained.

Furthermore, she was so ill from hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare side effect of pregnancy that includes excessive vomiting, that she had already been hospitalized twice due to severe dehydration and to save her kidneys, which doctors warned were at risk of failing.

Lauren’s husband, Jason, flew with her to a clinic in Colorado. She desperately tried to keep from vomiting before the plane left the ground. “I didn’t want anybody to remove me from the plane before we took off,” she recalled.

Today, Henry is a thriving 2-year-old. But if the Texas House passes a new bill, Senate Bill 2880, then women like Lauren could be prosecuted criminally for obtaining abortions — even if they have their procedures performed outside of Texas. The Senate passed the bill in April.

Here’s why, according to Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat who opposes the bill:

“The most egregious point of SB 2880 is that it quietly revives Texas’s pre-Roe abortion ban by explicitly incorporating the 1925 law into the bill’s definition of criminal abortion law,” Alvarado told colleagues as they debated the bill on April 30.

Alvarado was referencing a 1925 abortion ban in Texas that prohibited abortion and criminalized anyone who provided the means for procuring an abortion, with penalties including up to five years in prison. The 1973 US Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade effectively overturned the 1925 ban. However, in 2022, the high court overturned Roe.

Alvarado said SB 2880 — which twice references the 1925 ban — would allow Texas women to be prosecuted for having abortions, whether they’re in or out of the state when they occur.

“This bill will open the door to the criminalization of women seeking out-of-state abortions. The threat is not theoretical. It is written clearly into the text. This clause appears in no other abortion law currently on the books in Texas,” the lawmaker said.

In fact, if the legislature passes SB 2880 or its companion in the House, HB 5510, and Gov. Greg Abbott signs them into law, Texas will have the first law in the country that criminalizes women who end their pregnancies, and allows them to be sentenced to jail. HB 5510 has been left pending in a House committee since April 25.

SB 2880 has been called the “Women and Child Protection Act” by its author, Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican who authored SB 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act. When passed in 2021, SB 8 was the first of its kind to empower private citizens anywhere in the country to civilly sue anyone they believed aided a pregnant woman in getting an abortion. The Texas Heartbeat Act is still law today, part of a trio of laws that give Texas a near-total abortion ban.

If SB 2880 becomes law, women like Lauren who leave Texas for surgical abortions or to receive and take abortion pills out of state could face two to five years in prison once they return. Anyone who helps them obtain an abortion can also be charged criminally under the 1925 law, and sued civilly under SB 2880 by a private citizen located anywhere in the country who learns that the woman ended their pregnancy. The person could seek $100,000 plus attorney fees and court costs.

In Lauren’s case, the law would mean her husband, who accompanied his sick wife to the clinic, her mother, who babysat the couple’s toddler while they were away, and her father, who paid for her mother’s plane ticket to stay at their home, could have faced prison sentences and lawsuits.

Under SB 2880, entire families could land in Texas jails. Friends who knowingly provided childcare while a pregnant person left the state for an abortion or to get abortion medication could also be at risk.

A pregnant woman could even be seen as “furnishing her own means” for an abortion by simply making her way to an abortion clinic, or by ordering abortion pills from an out-of-state provider.

“This is not pro-family,” Lauren said. “What we did was pro-family. We wanted to prevent one twin son from suffering, we wanted to save the life of our other twin son, and we wanted to make sure our toddler grew up with a mommy.”

“Henry would not be here today if I hadn’t gone to Colorado. How could I have not made that decision,” she asked.

“There was no saving Thomas,” she added. “The urn with Thomas’ remains is in my office and I look at it every day. The reality is that if I hadn’t had the (single fetal abortion) procedure, Henry would be in there, too.”

Bella Pori, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said SB 2880 is an effort by GOP lawmakers to trap women seeking abortions in the state.

“They’re trying to criminalize people who are just trying to help their loved ones get out of state for medically necessary care,” Pori said. “They want to control women’s bodies and their movement to other states. They’re trying to trap Texans in the state.”

A long list of people could be sued under SB 2880

Those private citizens — who could include an angry ex, a disgruntled friend, an abuser, or simply a suspicious stranger — could also sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, mails, prescribes, or provides an abortion-inducing drug.

Reproductive health care clinics, doctors, nurses, abortion pill manufacturers, pharmacists, and organizations that raise funds to pay for the travel costs and abortion pills for Texas women could also be sued under SB 2880 — even if what they are doing is legal in the state where they reside. Medical facilities associated with a doctor who prescribes the pills could also be sued.

The woman herself can’t be sued under the law, but she could face criminal charges in Texas for taking the pills, even if she used them and underwent the medication abortion out of state.  

And in a bizarre twist, the law allows a woman who obtains abortion pills and takes them to end her pregnancy to sue anyone who helped supply her with them. 

Austin civil rights attorney Austin Kaplan called SB 2880 “scary,” adding that it violates the constitutionally protected right to travel between states.

Before the Senate passed the bill in April, Hughes insisted it wouldn’t amount to a travel ban on Texas women wanting to leave the state for reproductive health care. Sen. Molly Cooke, a Houston Democrat, called him out for using semantics as a dodge.

“We don’t believe you that this isn’t a travel ban and there is nothing in this bill that says you won’t be prosecuted for leaving the state,” she told him.

Lauren Miller pointed out that if SB 2880 passes, women like herself or Kate Cox — who was also carrying a fetus with a fatal fetal anomaly — would be trapped in Texas for fear of being criminally charged, even as they risk their lives and future fertility.

Lawmakers who vote to pass SB 2880 will be “putting people in the most impossible positions. People will always choose survival,” Lauren said. “And now survival is a crime.”

That’s why Lauren and several other plaintiffs in Zurawski v. Texas — all of whom were, in the past few years, pregnant with fetuses that had fatal anomalies or other dangerous complications, and who sued Texas over the bans that put their lives at risk — have joined a group called Free & Just.

The group aims to warn Texas women about the dangers of bills like SB 2880 and other anti-abortion legislation that rob them of their rights to control their own bodies and access life-saving care.

“We want to tell Texans that this reproductive health care crisis is happening,” said Kaitlyn Kash, one of the supporters of Free & Just, and a Zurawski plaintiff.

“Texas women are paying the price of the laws banning abortion,” Kaitlyn said.

In fact, since SB 8 became Texas law in 2021, maternal mortality has soared by 56%. Life-threatening cases of sepsis in pregnant women have skyrocketed more than 50%, and at least three young healthy women in the state died during miscarriages when they were denied timely treatment due to the abortion bans.

Kaitlyn Kash nearly bled to death after giving birth

Kaitlyn Kash could have been one of those women. The Austin mom gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Kaitlyn nearly hemorrhaged to death as hospital staff couldn’t find the equipment to perform dilation and curettage procedure to stop her bleeding. (A D&C removes tissue from the uterus, and the procedure frequently involves equipment and methods used during abortions, but it is not an abortion.)

“I went into hemorrhagic shock, passed out, and I later learned that I almost also lost my uterus,” Kaitlyn told Courier Texas.

She said she believes the hospital kept the D&C equipment under lock and key to avoid performing abortions.

In Texas, “we’re down to this point — women shouldn’t have to be ‘lucky’ that you don’t die and you get to save your uterus after giving birth,” she said. “This isn’t the gold standard of medicine.”

For Kaitlyn, this was one more traumatic experience as she and her husband tried to grow their family after the birth of her son, now 6.

At her 13-week anatomy scan in 2021, she learned that her developing baby suffered from skeletal dysplasia, a catastrophic condition that meant that her fetus had bones so brittle that its rib cage could never support its lungs. She was told that it was unlikely her baby would survive until birth.

Kaitlyn made the difficult decision to spare her baby any suffering and escaped to Kansas for an abortion. “I didn’t want my baby’s bones to start breaking even inside me. I don’t believe that is life,” she said.

Now that the Senate passed SB 2880, Kaitlyn is convinced that living under one of the strictest abortion bans in the country is “not enough” for Republican lawmakers.

“They want to have total control over our reproductive health,” she said.

”They want to ensure that we carry the pregnancies that they want, to term. They (get to) decide if you qualify for one of the few medical exceptions. And they want to find any way to criminalize everyone — pregnant women, the people who help them leave the state, even the Uber driver who takes them out of state,” Kaitlyn added.

Amanda Zurawski, another member of Free & Just, is horrified over SB 2880. Amanda almost died from sepsis when her water broke at 18 weeks pregnant and she was denied an abortion procedure because her unviable baby still had a heartbeat.

Only when the sepsis ravaged her body and she was fighting for her life did hospital doctors perform the procedure.

With the 1925 ban revived in SB 2880, Amanda said her family is shocked that women that face medical emergencies like she did could be prosecuted criminally and face civil lawsuits for helping to save her life.

“My mother who lives in Indiana was absolutely flabbergasted,” she said, explaining that when she couldn’t get an abortion to end her miscarriage, her mom offered to buy her and her husband, Josh, plane tickets to leave the state to seek care.

Amanda said SB 2880 is “about controlling women, which is really horrifying. They’re making it next to impossible for pregnant people to access care.”

Lauren agreed. “I think it’s all about control. You have men grasping for ways to feel powerful  and the only way that they can feel strong and like the big guys is to hurt others. Women have historically been a target.”