Texas city is latest to debate ban on road travel for those seeking abortion

Photograph: Justin Rex/AP

A string of Texas localities have passed controversial ordinances banning so-called “abortion trafficking” – and another city may soon join their number.

Over the last several weeks, the city of Amarillo, Texas, has become embroiled in a debate over whether to pass an ordinance to block people from using the city’s roads to transport pregnant people seeking abortions in other states. The city council met on Tuesday to debate the issue. As expected, it did not vote.

This type of ordinance has sprung up as part of a new anti-abortion tactic to undermine people’s ability to flee states with abortion bans. Since the fall of Roe v Wade, abortion foes have scrambled to find a way to cut off what they see as “abortion trafficking”, even though many experts argue that the US constitution protects the right to interstate travel.

Ahead of the meeting, the city council did not specify what the exact language of the ordinance under discussion would look like. After an opening prayer and an hour-long presentation by an anti-abortion doctor from Florida, the council discussed multiple possible anti-abortion ordinances, including an ordinance that would seemingly deal with “trafficking” as well as one that tackled abortion pills.

However, from the discussion, it was not always clear what, exactly, each draft ordinance would do. A city government staffer declined to provide copies of the drafts to the Guardian without a public records request.

“Whatever we come back with, it needs to protect life. So if it doesn’t, then maybe we’ve done enough,”Cole Stanley, the Amarillo mayor, said in the meeting. “But the right measure of enough is what we’re trying to get to. Nobody’s in here saying how they’ll vote, but I would greatly appreciate and much more entertain something that’s limited.”

In October, Lubbock county became the largest Texas locality yet to enact an ordinance restricting people’s ability to transport others for abortion-related travel. Idaho has also passed a separate law banning “abortion trafficking”, which would block people from taking minors across state lines for abortions without parental permission. A judge froze that law earlier this year.

“Texas has the most restrictive and harmful abortion legislation in place, period. So we feel that municipalities taking an additional stand on it is redundant,” said Lindsay London, a local activist who works with the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance, ahead of the Tuesday meeting. “But it’s really scary. Our options are so limited.”

Texas law currently bans almost all abortions. Amarillo lies at the north-western corner of Texas, so Texans fleeing the state for an abortion in nearby New Mexico, Colorado or Kansas may travel along its roads.

Texas has been at the center of the national debate over abortion since the US supreme court overturned Roe – a case that originated in Texas – in summer 2022. Twenty Texas women have filed a lawsuit, aided by two doctors, alleging that they were denied abortions in medical emergencies because the medical exceptions in Texas’s abortion bans are too vague. Earlier this month, yet another Texan became the first woman since the fall of Roe v Wade to file a lawsuit seeking an abortion while still pregnant.

She ultimately fled the state for the procedure, hours before the Texas state supreme court overturned an order that would have let her undergo it in her home state.

Amarillo is also the original home of the latest abortion-related case to hit the US supreme court. Just last week, the justices announced that they would take a case about the availability of abortion pills that began in Amarillo federal court.

London stressed that she is grateful that Amarillo’s leadership has met with members of the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance about their concerns over the proposed ordinance.

But, she added: “It’s five white men who are staunchly anti-abortion in our leadership. It’s kind of grim.”