Texas loves its bounty hunters and hates its women

The state finds new ways to target women's reproductive health and autonomy and inspires other states to enact their own draconian laws.

Over Labor Day weekend, I received an email from Jane’s Due Process, a nonprofit organization in Texas that supports young people navigating the state’s abortion bans and helps them confidentially access reproductive health care. The email reported on yet another draconian Texas law in effect as of Monday. S.B. 33 is a ban on municipal funding for abortion support that denies “millions of Texans the opportunity to have the cities and counties and public hospital districts where they live, work, and raise families support members of their communities getting safe legal abortion care outside the state.”

The email brought me right back to the same shell-shocked feeling I experienced exactly four years prior, on Sept. 1, 2021. That was the day Texas S.B. 8 went into effect—the law that not only banned abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy but also incentivized “abortion vigilantes.” Still on the books, S.B. 8 rewards anyone who turns in a fellow citizen who helps someone access abortion care—it could be a neighbor, a family member, even a stranger (say, an Uber driver)—with a cash bounty of $10,000.

At the time, it wasn’t just the diabolical nature of the law or the abject cruelty it encouraged that was so stunning. (Though it was and still is.) It was the fact that S.B. 8 was greenlighted into effect while Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. A full nine months before the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Texans were deprived of their constitutional rights by way of an unsigned, one-paragraph opinion from the shadow docket issued in the late hours of the night.

I was working at the Brennan Center for Justice then as a women and democracy fellow. Younger staff there, especially, were devastated by the outcome and the shockingly foul process; I vividly remember the pain expressed in group chats throughout the Labor Day weekend. Shortly after, we organized as a group, attorneys and researchers across areas of expertise—from voting rights to redistricting, money in politics to criminal legal reform-to write a series of articles demonstrating how every aspect of the nation’s systems of democracy played a part in the degradation of abortion rights. The collection was published by Ms. Magazine under the headline “Abortion is Essential to Democracy.”

Ever since, I have chosen to focus my own writing and advocacy on threading that needle, highlighting the ever-growing collection of examples of how attacks on women’s health and bodily autonomy are not just a target of anti-abortion activists— that’s not new, they have been at it for the past half a century, certainly since Roe—but a real-time laboratory for proposing and pilot-testing true authoritarian advances.

Back to Texas 2025, leader of that laboratory, the state where the nation’s most antidemocratic laws become normalized in a red-state race to the bottom. As local activist Terrysa Guerra writes, “Gov. Greg Abbott often brags that Texas is a blueprint for the rest of the country. Indeed. So goes Texas, so goes democracy.” Texas now bans abortion altogether, with criminal penalties of up to life imprisonment for physicians. Bounty hunter laws similar to S.B. 8 have spread to other states—and have gone beyond abortion to include rewards for reporting trans people and librarians. And just last week, the Texas House advanced a new bounty hunter scheme, passing H.B. 7—allowing nearly any private citizen to sue out-of-state abortion pill prescribers who send the medication into Texas. The Texas Senate approved it Wednesday. If signed into law, it would be the first of its kind in the country.

The human toll is real, too. Throughout the state, the Texas Tribune reports, maternal deaths are rising, cases of sepsis are more common, and infant mortality has increased. Because women are forced to travel out of state for care, the cost of accessing abortion care is higher than ever.

According to the Jane’s Due Process Labor Day email, the cities of Austin and San Antonio are among those that protected their communities by budgeting for abortion funds. Now it is barred by S.B. 33, which is not only a direct attack on community care but also strips cities of their right to self-govern and silences the will of local voters to consolidate power at the state level.

“This is another attack on democracy in an anti-abortion disguise,” said Lucie Arvallo, the executive director of Jane’s Due Process. “Voters in Austin and San Antonio overwhelmingly elected city councils that recognized that access to safe legal abortion is a public good that helps families thrive. Jane’s Due Process and our partners at the other Texas Abortion funds will continue to help Texans get the abortion care they need even while [the] anti-abortion movement and their allies destroy democracy to achieve their goals.”

To support Jane’s Due Process, click here.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

---