Would your husband betray you for $100,000?
What about your mother or your father?
How about one of your children ratting you out for $100,000?
Texas Republican lawmakers, who control the state’s legislature, hope that all of them will sell you out for money.
That’s if you are a pregnant woman in their state and have ended your pregnancy using safe FDA - approved abortion pills!
It’s the latest tactic in their war on women’s reproductive freedom in the longhorn state. Having already banned ‘surgical’ abortions in the state, forcing women to travel hundreds of miles to health clinics in ‘abortion legal’ states, Republican lawmakers now want to prevent abortion pills from entering Texas.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has just signed the bill - House Bill 7 ( HB7) - into law. It’s designed to stop Texas’s pregnant women from being able to get their hands on safe FDA -approved abortion pills, prescribed by physicians in states where abortion is legal, and who send the pills to their homes.
This is the first anti abortion law of its kind in the country, demonstrating that once again, Texas is at the forefront of forcing women to give birth when they have unwanted pregnancies.
They were the very first state to ban abortion in 2021, a whole year ahead of the Supreme Court overturning Roe V Wade. Now, if they are successful in stopping the flow of abortion pills into the state, every Republican -controlled state will pass their own copy cat version of their abortion bill ban.
And in a cruel twist that will scare and isolate pregnant women in the state, HB7 won’t actually be enforced by anti abortion extremist Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in difficult to prove criminal prosecutions.
Instead, it weaponizes her family against her.
Here’s how it works: HB7 empowers cash - hungry vigilantes, especially a pregnant woman’s closest family members, to bring $10 - $100,000 civil suits against anyone and everyone in the country who prescribes, and mails abortion pills to her.
Texas has already incentivized bounty hunters to bring lawsuits against any doctor who performs an ‘illegal’ abortion in the state, and now it’s trying to impose it’s abortion ban on every state where doctors can still legally prescribe abortion pills to desperate Texas women.
REPUBLICANS WANT TO PAY OFF HUSBANDS TO SELL OUT THEIR WIVES
Republicans hope HB7 will unleash husbands, parents and even children to find out who exactly sent abortion pills to their wife/daughter/mother.
They know that family members will have no trouble pairing up with one of the state’s ferociously anti abortion lawyers who will sue the medical provider who helped their mom, wife or daughter end her pregnancy.
Republican legislators don’t have to be shrinks to also guess that distressed and isolated pregnant women in Texas are most likely to confess all to their husbands, mothers or even to their teen children.
They will share with their husband or mother the specific doctor who prescribed the pills. OR husbands and children could even search the history on their pregnant ‘loved one’s’ computer or phone in order to get the information they need to sue for $100,000.
That’s why HB7 offers the top money award of $100,000 to a pregnant woman’s very closest family members so they will betray her trust and sue the medical provider who helped her in her time of need.
All other bounty hunters can still sue abortion pill providers for $100,000 but they are allowed to only put $10,000 into their own pockets. The other $90,000 must be donated to the charity of their choice, including any anti abortion group that they want.
So much for Republicans being the self proclaimed party of ‘family values’ for the past few decades.
Is it family values to dangle $100,000 to members of Texas families to turn on one another? Is it family values to terrorize pregnant women in their own homes by urging children to spy on their moms? And husbands to sellout their wives secrets?
Texas Republicans are enshrining family treachery into a law, all in the cause of stopping every single abortion in the state ,unless it’s performed in a serious medical emergency.
(FYI abortion pills are still legal for hospitals to have on hand in case a woman risks death from complications unless her pregnancy isn’t terminated or if she is bleeding out from a miscarriage).
Only then can doctors legally crack open bottles of the pills - mifepristine and misoprostol - which are used as abortion or miscarriage medication.
But those will be very rare circumstances.
This bill is “trying to destroy families,” Nimra Chowdhry, senior state legislative counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me.
“It will create a culture of surveillance among community members and families. It will sow fear and confusion and create an even more hostile environment for all pregnant people in Texas,” she says.
Now, to be clear Texas Republican legislators have already zealously passed multiple abortion laws, banning terminations in the state from conception, even in cases of rape and incest.
But when they instituted these laws, they didn’t for see that with the help of caring and courageous telehealth medical providers in ‘abortion legal’ states, that Texas would now have the country’s highest number of abortions, using pills. These are called ‘medication abortions.
Whomp! Whomp!
In fact, there were an average 3,427 monthly medication abortions in Texas in the final quarter of 2024, according to the #WeCount report from the Society of Family Planning, a nonprofit that advocates for abortion access.
These numbers clearly made Texas’s right wing lawmakers blow a gasket when they learned that their abortion bans hadn’t prevented more monthly medication abortions by the end of 2024 than even before Roe V wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.
These zealots are furious that “people are still getting safe legal abortion care, despite the lack of availability in Texas, by accessing telehealth and also traveling to other states,” Blake Rocap, the legislative counsel for Avow, an abortion advocacy group in Texas, told me.
The bill is a “temper tantrum” by Texas Republicans contends Chowdhry.
SCARING OFF DOCTORS FROM LEGALLY PROVIDING ABORTION PILLS ?
That’s why Texas Republican lawmakers are now trying to intimidate out of state medical providers with the threat of lawsuits from bounty hunters if they keep on o prescribing and sending abortion pills to Texas women in need.
Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All and a native Texan, told me that she believes that activist groups who’ve been helping Texas women get the care they need will not be scared off because of this new law.
“Even though the restrictions are incredibly egregious, there’s been a tremendous network of activists and providers who’ve been determined to provide these patients with care,” she says.
“The activists and the folks behind these organizations are some of the bravest people I know, and they are not intimidated.”
Want to know just how hypocritical the supposedly ‘family values’ Republican party is in Texas?
They have actually called this bill, the ‘Woman and Child Protection Act’.
As if, they are actually concerned with protecting Texas’s women and children!
The only ‘children’ that extremist anti abortion Republicans are protecting are ‘unborn’ embryos up to11 weeks old, since that is the latest that abortion pills can be used.
And as for protecting women - does living in fear that your own mother, father or teen child could backstab you while you try to end an unwanted pregnancy, sound like you are being protected?
No way!
In reality, this is the party that has refused to provide healthcare to women by expanding Medicaid coverage. Over twenty % of women in the state have no health insurance.
Furthermore, if Republicans actually wanted to protect the state’s women, then they would be freaked out that maternal mortality has skyrocketed by 56% since they implemented their first abortion ban in 2021!
That’s 56% more women dying in pregnancy, in child birth or in the months after giving birth!
If they wanted to protect women in the state wouldn’t they would want to study why this was happening and then fix it???
Nope. Instead they are passing THIS abortion ban against pills that are safer than ibuprofen or Viagra no matter what that dangerous quack RFK Jr tells you.
And if Texas lawmakers like Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton and the author of HB7, Senator Bryan Hughes, actually cared about protecting the state’s kids, why are they recklessly lax about allowing the biggest killer of children - guns- to be owned by absolutely anyone??
Meanwhile Texas children are twice as likely NOT to have health insurance as the average American child!
The truth is that there is so much that Republicans in Texas and everywhere else in this country could do to ‘protect’ the health and lives of pregnant women and children but they have zippo interest in actually doing that.
What they really want to do is force women and girls - even 10 year-old girls - to give birth.
THE REAL REASON REPUBLICANS PASS ABORTION BANS REVEALED
That’s why they want to seal off Texas’s female population from having access to abortion pills.
But once women and girls are forced to give birth, Republicans aren’t interested in providing health care or food assistance or affordable housing to mothers or children.
Mini Timmaraju , the president of Reproductive Freedom For All, laid out the straight truth about Texas’s new ban against abortion pills and all abortion, to me and you.
“The traditional white male - dominated Republican party wants to assert power and control over women’s bodies,” she said” They want to control women’s bodies because they want us out of the workforce. They want to go back in time.”
“Because they don’t want a society where women and people of color are competitive on a level playing field with white men, because it erodes their power.”
That’s why she believes that Republicans are opposed to paid family leave from work and for equal pay for women. It’s all connected.
“Abortion bans are a tool to exert power and control over American women in society.” Now Texas has one more tool.
I couldn’t agree more.
If you agree and want to fight back in a super constructive way, right now, then I urge you to donate to the campaigns of Democrats Abigail Spanberger for Governor, Ghazala Hashmi for Lt Governor Jones and Jay Jones for Attorney General - all of Virginia.
There’s no way that you would want anti abortion extremist Winsome Earle - Sears for governor. She has compared abortion to slavery. And the other Republican candidates are equally anti abortionist MAGAs. The election is Nov 4th.
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It really is but so many of the women that I have interviewed like Dr Austin Dennard & Megan Bond say that they still love their state and want to stay & fight for it. I definitely respect their courage & determination.
It is a death sentence for any woman to become impregnated in the occupied USA.