Texas city to vote on banning patients from traveling through it for abortion

A city nestled in the northern tip of Texas, which was at the heart of a major US supreme court case over abortion rights this year, has found itself at the forefront of the abortion wars once again.

Come November, residents of Amarillo, Texas, will vote on an ordinance that would declare Amarillo a “sanctuary city for the unborn” and ban people from helping patients travel through Amarillo to access abortions – what the ordinance calls “abortion trafficking”. It would also ban people from possessing or distributing abortion pills within Amarillo city limits.

Over the last several months, a string of Texas localities have passed similar ordinances. Amarillo’s city council spent months arguing over whether to pass its own “sanctuary city” ordinance, but in June, the council officially rejected it.

However, while the ordinance languished before the council, a separate group gathered enough signatures for the ordinance to appear on Amarillo’s November ballot. Although the city council is still deliberating the language to describe the ordinance on the ballot, activists in the city are already gearing up to campaign against it.

“We are ready,” said Lindsay London, an activist with the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance. “Travel bans harm communities. They harm the privacy of medical relationships. They do not help our communities to be strong and safe and supported.”

Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance, which is run by volunteers, plans to canvass, phone-bank and even take out billboards. “We’ve never done this before,” London said. “We have our work cut out for us.”

If passed, the ordinance would not expose people seeking abortions to liability, but rather anyone who “aids or abets an elective abortion if the abortion is performed on a resident of Amarillo” regardless of where the abortion occurs. Texans may sue one another over suspected violations of the law, with damages of $10,000 for each violation. In 2021, Texas enacted a similar law to undermine Roe v Wade’s protections and ban abortion past roughly six weeks of pregnancy.

Texas law already bans almost all abortions. But because Amarillo is one of the few major cities in the Texas panhandle, travelers from Texas and other southern states may pass through it on their way to New Mexico, where abortion remains accessible.

Since the US supreme court overturned Roe two years ago, Amarillo has become something of a ground zero for fights over abortion. In late 2022, a coalition of anti-abortion doctors and activists filed a lawsuit over abortion pills in a federal court located in Amarillo. The lawsuit argued that the Food and Drug Administration had overstepped its authority when it approved mifepristone, a common abortion pill, for use in abortions in 2000.

By filing the case in Amarillo, the abortion opponents effectively guaranteed that it would land on the desk of Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump with a history of opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

Last year, Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of suspending the FDA approval of mifepristone – a move that could have devastated abortion access across the country, including in states that protect abortion rights. The case ultimately became the first abortion case to land at the supreme court since the overturning of Roe. Last month, the supreme court ruled in a 9-0 decision that the abortion opponents behind the case did not have the legal right to sue in the first place.

“Kacsmaryk’s placement in a federal court here has made Amarillo an unsuspecting hotbed for repro rights and repro decisions that can have huge ramifications,” London said. “But when it comes to the day-to-day voter, many of them have no idea that this is even something that’s happening.”

Amarillo’s proposed “sanctuary city” ordinance repeatedly cites the federal Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice act that bans the mailing of all abortion-related materials. Although the Biden administration has issued guidance declaring that the Comstock Act – whose anti-abortion provisions were blocked from taking effect under Roe – only applies to people who intend to break the law, some anti-abortion activists believe that the Comstock Act can be used to implement a nationwide abortion ban.

“We call upon every United States attorney in the state of Texas, both present and future, to investigate and prosecute abortion providers and abortion pill-distribution networks,” the proposed ordinance declares, urging lawyers to go after providers using the Comstock Act as well as anti-racketeering laws.

By seeding references to the Comstock Act in legislation and litigation throughout the country, anti-abortion activists are hoping to create opportunities for higher courts to step in and rule that the 151-year-old Comstock Act remains good law.

Project 2025, a playbook written by the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggests that a future Republican president use the Comstock Act to ban the mailing of all abortion pills. Some anti-abortion activists in Texas – such as Mark Lee Dickson, who has pushed for Amarillo’s “sanctuary city” ordinance – have gone even further, arguing that the Comstock Act also bans the mailing of both pills and “any surgical equipment used for an elective abortion”.

Such an interpretation of the Comstock Act would effectively ban almost all abortions.