On August 28, 2025, Texas lawmakers took yet another bold step in the ongoing national battle over abortion rights, passing House Bill 7—a measure that pushes the state’s abortion restrictions to new and controversial frontiers. The bill, which sailed through the Texas House of Representatives on a largely party-line vote, empowers private citizens to sue anyone who mails, transports, manufactures, or prescribes abortion-inducing pills to Texas residents, even if the provider is located in another state. As the bill heads toward likely approval by the Republican-majority Senate and Governor Greg Abbott, its passage signals a dramatic escalation in the legal and political fight over abortion access in the United States.
House Bill 7 is designed to clamp down on the flow of abortion medications—specifically mifepristone and misoprostol—into Texas, a state where nearly all abortions are now banned following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. According to Common Dreams, the bill is modeled on Texas’s earlier Senate Bill 8, the infamous “bounty hunter” law, but it goes even further by extending civil liability to out-of-state healthcare providers, manufacturers, and anyone else who facilitates access to abortion pills for Texans. Private individuals, regardless of any direct connection to a case, could sue alleged violators for at least $100,000 in damages per violation.
Supporters of the bill argue that it is about protecting Texas women and upholding the state’s right to regulate abortion. Republican state representative Jeff Leach, who co-authored the legislation, declared on the House floor, “This bill is about protecting the rights of fellow Texans and protecting their moms as well.” Women who take abortion medication themselves, as well as those who use the pills after miscarriages, are shielded from liability under the bill—a point its backers emphasize as evidence of compassion and fairness.
Critics, however, see the measure as a dangerous overreach that threatens to upend the lives of Texans and undermine the privacy and autonomy of women across the country. Blair Wallace, policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, warned in a statement that “H.B. 7 exports Texas’ extreme abortion ban far beyond state borders. It will fuel fear among manufacturers and providers nationwide, while encouraging neighbors to police one another’s reproductive lives, further isolating pregnant Texans, and punishing the people who care for them.” As Common Dreams reported, reproductive rights advocates have condemned the bill as fostering a “bounty-hunting culture” that could create a climate of intimidation and surveillance.
The practical implications of the law are sweeping. Not only does it prohibit the manufacture, distribution, and provision of abortion drugs within Texas, but it also targets out-of-state providers and manufacturers who mail, transport, or prescribe the drugs to Texans. As Al Jazeera noted, the law’s reach is so broad that it allows lawsuits against anyone involved in facilitating medication abortions for Texas residents—even if no abortion actually occurs. Under pressure from anti-abortion groups, lawmakers added a provision requiring that only $10,000 of any damages awarded could be kept by the plaintiff, with the remainder directed to a charity of their choosing.
This aggressive legal maneuvering is part of a broader, multipronged campaign by Texas and other conservative states to restrict abortion access nationwide. In recent months, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has pursued legal actions against out-of-state providers, including suing a New York doctor in December 2024 for mailing abortion pills to a Texan and sending cease-and-desist letters to telehealth abortion-pill providers in August 2025. In February, a Texas court fined the same New York doctor $100,000 for remotely prescribing abortion pills—a move seen as a warning shot to providers nationwide.
Meanwhile, Texas and Florida have joined forces in a federal lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seeking to roll back access to mifepristone, the primary drug used in medication abortions. As Slate reported, the states filed their request before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in Amarillo, Texas, who previously attempted to rescind the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2023. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in June 2024 that the original anti-abortion doctors who brought the case lacked standing, but Texas and Florida now hope to revive the litigation by arguing that telemedicine abortions and the mailing of abortion pills undermine their ability to enforce state bans.
Legal experts say the new approach could present a more plausible case for standing, especially given Texas’s recent efforts to demonstrate harm from out-of-state providers. Rachel Rebouché, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law and a specialist in reproductive health law, told Slate, “Texas intervening is an argument that gets closer to demonstrating harm because Texas has sued [a physician], and there are litigants from Texas suing people in other states.” The litigation is not just about mifepristone’s safety—although the states cite both legitimate and dubious data to argue their case—but also about the broader question of whether states can enforce their abortion bans against providers and manufacturers in other jurisdictions.
The stakes are high. According to data from the Society of Family Planning, medication abortions now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., with 1 in 4 performed via telehealth by the end of 2024. Shield laws in Democratic-controlled states have enabled doctors to prescribe abortion pills to an estimated 12,330 people per month across state lines, providing a lifeline for women in states with abortion bans. Aid Access, a prominent abortion-pill service, reported prescribing nearly 100,000 sets of pills to people in states that have banned the procedure or telemedicine between July 2023 and August 2024.
Republican officials and anti-abortion activists see these developments as an existential threat to their efforts to restrict abortion. The Texas bill and the federal lawsuit represent attempts to close what they view as loopholes in state bans and to force the Supreme Court or a future presidential administration to intervene. As Marc Hearron, associate director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told The New York Times, “Texas is sort of the tip of the spear. It’s setting up a clash.” He added, “Each state can have its own laws, but throughout our history, we have been able to travel across the country, send things across the country.”
The legal and political battles show no sign of abating. As supporters hope—and opponents fear—Texas’s new law could become a model for other states seeking to stem the tide of medication abortion. Court challenges are all but certain, and the ultimate outcome could reshape the landscape of reproductive rights in the U.S. for years to come. For now, the passage of House Bill 7 marks a new chapter in the struggle, with Texas once again at the center of the nation’s most contentious debates over abortion.
As the dust settles on this latest legislative move, one thing is clear: the fight over abortion access in America is far from over, and Texas’s aggressive tactics are likely to reverberate across the country, testing the boundaries of state power and individual rights in ways both profound and deeply personal.
