AUSTIN, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — Texas introduced a bill that would allow citizens to sue those who manufacture, distribute, or prescribe abortion pills, the most common method of killing preborn babies in the U.S. today.
The latest version of the “Women and Child Protection Act” (WCPA), which was heard today in the state Senate, would also allow citizens to file a wrongful death lawsuit if abortion pills result in “harm or death” to an unborn child or the mother. In addition, the Texas attorney general would be able to sue on behalf of unborn children of Texans, according to the bill, SB 6.
According to CBS News, the legislation also aims to counteract shield laws in other states designed to legally protect those who distribute abortion pills to states such as Texas where they are illegal.
Current Texas law allows at least three ways to sue anyone who distributes abortion pills in the state, but there have been enforcement problems due to other states’ shield laws immunizing such abortion pill providers.
A June 24 letter led by Texas Right to Life called for a special session for the purpose of passing the pro-life law because of the need for “better tools to fight this growing evil.”
“Approximately 19,000 abortion pills are mailed into Texas each year,” the letter says, that “pose a grave threat — not only because they are marketed directly to vulnerable women (often online and without medical oversight) but also because of their high complication rate and the difficulty in prosecuting the out-of-state actors who peddle them into Texas.”
“Regardless of the circumstance, abortion pills are not safe,” it adds. The letter points out that besides killing innocent preborn babies, abortion pills cause one in 10 women to suffer serious medical complications, according to a study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Earlier this year, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York abortionist for mailing abortion-inducing drugs to the state, securing an order that imposed a $100,000 fine.
The Foundation to Abolish Abortion (FAA) has campaigned against SB 6 because it states that no civil action may be brought against the mother who attempted to abort her preborn child. FAA argues that the only way to stop the continued mass prenatal death in the state is to allow women who abort their own children to be at least civilly penalized, with a “case-by-case” consideration of their “mental culpability.”
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents with a variety of tactics, especially the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of contraceptive and abortion pills across state lines, regardless of the risks to the women they claim to be serving, as LifeSiteNews has reported.
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 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 recent Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear safer than they really are.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” Catholic University of America research associate Michael New wrote. “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.’”
