On Tuesday, voters in Amarillo, Texas, decisively rejected a proposal that would have effectively banned using local streets and highways to access out-of-state abortions.
The northern Texas city of Amarillo is just an hour drive from New Mexico — where more than 14,000 Texans sought abortion care last year — and on a direct route to Colorado.
“It’s something that touches all our lives, and we reject extremist government overreach,” said Lindsay London, co-founder of the abortion rights advocacy group the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance. “Particularly when it comes to penalizing support for travel, it violates our constitutional rights.”
Abortion travel bans impose civil liabilities on anyone who helps a pregnant person travel out of state for an abortion, which anti-abortion advocates call “abortion trafficking.” These ordinances penalize anyone helping a person access an abortion, including by providing financial support or transportation, and are enforced through private lawsuits.
At least five Texas counties — including Lubbock, Cochran, Mitchell, Goliad and Dawson — and a handful of Texas cities have passed abortion travel bans. While these measures do not directly punish pregnant people for seeking an abortion out of state, they could trigger civil or criminal investigations. For example, Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer and an architect of the state’s abortion bounty hunting law, has filed legal petitions seeking private patient information and to depose women he claims traveled outside Texas for abortions.
After the Amarillo city council refused to implement an abortion travel ban in 2023, residents began gathering signatures to petition for the council to reconsider the measure last summer. The council rejected both the original ordinance and an amended version, prompting the petitioning committee to seek the ballot initiative. Since Texas does not allow voters to directly place propositions on the ballot, Amarillo voters’ ability to vote on this proposition is a rare instance where Texas residents have had a direct say on abortion.
This effort comes as Amarillo has become a prominent stronghold of the anti-abortion movement, both in Texas and nationwide, largely due to the city’s sole federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is a far right Trump appointee who has repeatedly supported conservative challenges to reproductive rights, including attacks on the abortion pill and minors’ access to birth control. Kacsmaryk’s anti-abortion stance has encouraged numerous anti-abortion nonprofits, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, to file lawsuits challenging reproductive rights in his district.
Anti-abortion leader Mark Lee Dickson, who spearheaded the push for the abortion travel ban in Amarillo, ominously told the Texas Tribune that the rejected abortion travel ban is “in line with the Republican Party of Texas 2024 Party Platform,” and declared that the fight against reproductive rights in Amarillo is “far from over.”
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