Paxton’s Record of “Opposition to Abortion [As] a Core Part of His Political Identity” Attracts Support from Right-Wing Groups Aiming to Prosecute Women
NY Times: Paxton who “has long made his opposition to abortion a core part of his political identity, has been silent on the issue”
AUSTIN, TX — Right-wing groups are making no secret of their plan to court Ken Paxton’s support for even more severe restrictions on reproductive healthcare that include prosecuting women and criminalizing patients, according to reporting from the New York Times.
Because of Paxton’s extreme record as a “fierce defender of antiabortion laws, filing novel lawsuits against pill distributors and out-of-state abortion providers,” a “prominent pro-criminalization group” is “rallying politicians across the state, including Mr. Paxton.” The head of the group said the movement to prosecute women who have abortions is “where we need to be spending the most political capital” and “We’d love to talk to [Paxton] and get his support behind it.”
Texas women continue to die, are forced to flee the state, and are refused medical care due to hospitals’ fear of criminal punishment from Paxton under Texas’ abortion ban.
Read for yourself:
NY Times: Support Builds on the Right for Prosecuting Women Who Get Abortions
June 25, 2026
By Caroline Kitchener
A growing number of conservative leaders are starting to argue that the only way to stop women from ending their pregnancies could be to arrest them.
The shift is coming as activists express frustration that the number of abortions happening now is higher than when Roe v. Wade was overturned, largely because of the growing availability of abortion pills even in states where the procedure is banned.
Today, the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe, a group of more than 60 conservative influencers, antiabortion leaders, and pastors signed a petition to remove the “legal immunities” that have protected women who get abortions from prosecution.
That follows a vote earlier this month by delegates to the Texas Republican Party’s state convention to endorse repealing the legal protections that exempt women who get abortions from criminal penalties, a move solidified by a thunderous voice vote on the convention floor.
At the same time, the largest antiabortion group in Texas is formulating an idea to test the political waters on the issue. It is proposing to target a narrow slice of women, those with medical licenses, by threatening to revoke their licenses if they are caught taking abortion pills.
“In the last four years, our attitude has lightened a little bit because we are looking at the scope of the problem,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, the group floating the idea to target patients with medical licenses. “I want for it not to be taboo to ask, ‘What is the accountability for these women?’”
In Texas, Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate who has long made his opposition to abortion a core part of his political identity, has been silent on the issue
Mr. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.
Some leaders in the national antiabortion movement are working behind the scenes to build a coalition willing to support the idea of criminally charging women who get abortions. A group called “The White Rose Resistance,” led by the antiabortion activist Seth Gruber, has been circulating the petition toward that end.
“We call upon lawmakers to remove legal immunities that allow the intentional killing of preborn children to continue, and to enact laws that provide full and equal protection under the law from violence and destruction, from the moment of fertilization,” reads the petition.
Abortion rights advocates warned that imposing criminal penalties for abortions could put women’s lives at risk, noting that women who have abortions or miscarriages will be scared to get medical care when they need it.
The issue came up earlier this month at the Texas Republican Party convention in Houston, where party activists had gathered in part to decide what issues they wanted their state legislators to prioritize when the legislature convenes for its next session early next year.
A group of activists pushed forcefully for the party to prioritize repealing the laws that protect women who get abortions from prosecution. In committee meetings and floor speeches, they spoke of how babies in the womb deserved “equal protection” under the law, a concept widely appealing to those who oppose abortion, and pointed to studies showing that tens of thousands of abortion pills had flooded into Texas last year.
“For years, Texas pro-life leaders have been declaring victories while tens of thousands of babies are still being legally murdered in our state,” Representative David Lowe said in the video. “It’s time to stop patting ourselves on the back.”
Representative Brent Money, who sponsored an unsuccessful bill last year to roll back criminal protections for women, said in a statement that imposing criminal penalties on those who get abortions is “the most logically and morally consistent pro-life position.”
Bradley Pierce, the president of a prominent pro-criminalization group, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, said the movement had never had more momentum than it does at this moment. He said he expected a swell of support for his position when the Texas legislature convenes next year — earning new converts among those who “see that the standard anti-abortion strategy is not working.”
He said he and his colleagues planned to spend the next few months rallying politicians across the state, including Mr. Paxton.
As attorney general of Texas, Mr. Paxton positioned himself as a fierce defender of antiabortion laws, filing novel lawsuits against pill distributors and out-of-state abortion providers. He declared June 24, the day Roe was overturned, an annual holiday for the attorney general’s office. He is locked in a competitive race against State Representative James Talarico, a Democrat who has made his support for abortion rights a prominent part of his message.
“We’d love to talk to him and get his support behind it,” Mr. Pierce said of Mr. Paxton.
Mr. Pierce said the movement to prosecute women who have abortions is “where we need to be spending the most political capital.” He added: “This is the hill we need to be willing to die on.”
HuffPost: Texas Passed A Law To Clarify When Women Should Receive Life-Saving Care. She Almost Died Anyway.
Jun 29, 2026
By Alanna Vagianos
For a few nights in October, Lynn Callaway went to sleep not knowing if she’d wake up in the morning.
Callaway was actively miscarrying at her home in Austin, Texas, after being turned away by two hospital emergency rooms in a 72-hour period, according to a federal complaint filed last week. She spent her days curled up in bed in agonizing pain, experiencing chills, fever and an overwhelming amount of blood loss.
The treatment plan for early pregnancy loss in Texas, a state with one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country, is to send patients home and let the miscarriage run its course.
But, like so many women denied miscarriage care since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Callaway developed an infection — leaving her at death’s door with no one to turn to for help.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know, I might bleed out,’” Callaway told HuffPost. “I was thinking: If it’s going to happen, I’d rather it happen here and not in a car or on a plane trying to get somewhere.”
“I’m, in that moment, trying to plan for my death,” she said.
Callaway and her husband had long discussions about what to do if she didn’t make it. She walked him through her insurance policy so he would know what to do when she was gone. She encouraged him to move back to Georgia with their 8-year-old son, where they would have more family support.
Six days, multiple emergency room visits and repeated calls to her OB-GYN’s office later, Callaway was finally offered care to fully expel her pregnancy. Her OB-GYN prescribed her antibiotics for the infection and abortion medication to complete the miscarriage. When Callaway asked her OB why the ER doctors had not offered her the same medication, her OB responded that the ER would “have to be damned sure that it’s an actual miscarriage to be offering the pill,” the complaint states.
In her lawsuit, Callaway alleges that two hospitals violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, also known as EMTALA. The federal law requires hospitals to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there have been dozens of pregnant women across the country — in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma and elsewhere — who were denied emergency abortion care because they weren’t close enough to death.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has, in many ways, led the fight against EMTALA, filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration in 2022 and claiming Texas shouldn’t have to comply with the federal law because of the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Paxton accused the Biden administration of trying to “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic” by allowing emergency health care doctors to provide abortion and miscarriage care.
Though the Supreme Court rejected a different attempt to sidestep emergency abortion care in 2024, the attacks on the federal requirement are ongoing. Last year, President Donald Trump rescinded a Biden-era guideline that abortion rights groups said would lead to more delays and denials of care. Callaway’s attorneys write in the complaint that EMTALA investigations are now being delayed by the Trump administration in part because of Paxton’s 2022 lawsuit.
Paxton’s office did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Texas’ abortion ban currently has no exceptions for rape or incest, and carries penalties for doctors that include revoking medical licenses, $100,000 in fines, and up to 99 years in prison.
Simply offering the standard of care as an OB-GYN or emergency room physician in Texas could put a doctor in prison for life.
“Two things can be true at the same time: The fear by doctors can be real, and at the same time many hospitals need to be doing a lot more,” Duane said.
But just months before Callaway was turned away from two emergency rooms, Texas passed a law intended to offer clarity for physicians providing miscarriage care under the state’s abortion ban. The law, titled The Life of the Mother Act, passed after at least three Texas women died from delays in care and rates of sepsis increased among pregnant women under the state’s abortion ban. The law specified that a pregnant woman’s death does not need to be “imminent” for the abortion ban’s life of the mother exception to apply.
And yet, Callaway still nearly died.
Both hospitals have specific emergency departments for labor and delivery patients, but at seven weeks, Callaway was not far enough into her pregnancy to be seen by those specialists.
The ER physician at the second hospital, St. David’s Round Rock Medical Center, also said Callaway was having a miscarriage and she had developed an infection but they could not offer care to terminate her pregnancy, according to the lawsuit. The St. David’s doctors told Callaway to call her OB-GYN, but her OB-GYN’s office was closed because it was Saturday. Meanwhile, her condition continued to deteriorate.
“No one seems to think this is an emergency but me,” Callaway recalled thinking at the time, according to the complaint.
Months before Callaway was turned away from two emergency rooms, Texas passed a law intended to offer clarity for physicians providing miscarriage care under the state’s abortion ban.
Abortion clinics used to provide the majority of early miscarriage management care, but there are no abortion clinics left in the state. Early miscarriages are one of the most common pregnancy complications, with more than 80% of all miscarriages occurring during the first trimester. The current system created by Texas’ draconian abortion ban has left women like Callaway to essentially fall through the cracks.
Callaway was finally able to access abortion pills at her OB-GYN’s office — nearly a week later — because her OB found retained tissue in Callaway’s uterus and made the decision to offer proper care.
Months after this ordeal, Callaway was on a family vacation in Portugal when she started bleeding profusely. She felt a gush of blood and was in a lot of pain. She and her husband drove to an emergency room, where doctors found she had more retained tissue from her miscarriage that her OB-GYN and the hospitals in her home state had missed.
“It felt like going through the miscarriage all over again. Yet for the first time since the ordeal began, I felt safe with a physician,” Callaway wrote in two other complaints filed with the Texas Medical Board and Texas Board of Nursing. “Even though they did not speak the same language, I trusted this physician more than any of the providers who had cared for me in Texas.”
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