Anti-abortion groups sue San Antonio over reproductive justice fund
Several anti-abortion groups on Tuesday sued the city of San Antonio over the city’s plan to create a reproductive justice fund and provide $500,000 to organizations that offer Texans reproductive care.
The lawsuit seeks to put a halt to the reproductive justice fund, which, it alleges, would give taxpayers’ dollars to “criminal organizations that violate the state’s abortion laws” by helping people get abortions out of state. Because Texas law bans anybody from helping “procure” an abortion, the lawsuit argues, “if any part of the ‘procurement’ activity occurs within Texas, then the act is criminal even if the abortion that has been ‘procured’ takes place outside the state.”
It’s not yet clear, however, whether the $500,000 devoted to the reproductive justice fund – out of the city’s $3.7bn budget for 2024 – will in fact go towards groups that help people get abortions or instead be used to fund other kinds of reproductive services. In a proposal for the fund viewed by the Guardian, reproductive justice organizations suggested the money support a wide variety of causes, including expanding access to pregnancy tests, diapers and doulas as well as covering travel to abortion clinics outside of Texas. It would not pay directly for abortion procedures.
“It’s a shame that such a comprehensive initiative that aims to actually improve the health outcomes of our San Antonio community is being reduced to misinformation,” said Laura
Molinar, co-director of Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas, one of the organizations that championed the Reproductive Justice Fund’s creation. “I’m at a loss for words, because I’m just so upset.”
The San Antonio city attorney, Andy Segovia, said that no decision has been made on how the money in the reproductive justice fund will be used. The city council will hold an open work session to discuss the issue.
“It is unfortunate taxpayer funds will be spent on defending against this lawsuit based on misinformation and false allegations,” Segovia said in a statement. “The funds will be distributed in accordance with state and federal laws.”
The lawsuit is the latest volley in the pitched battle betweenTexas abortion rights organizations and Jonathan Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who is credited with pioneering the novel legal strategy behind the Texas six-week abortion ban (which went into effect in 2021 despite flying in the face of Roe v Wade). Mitchell is now involved in a host of abortion-related litigation. He recently represented a Texan man suing his ex-wife’s friends for allegedly helping her get an abortion, and asked Texas abortion funds to hand over information about every abortion they had ever “assisted” over the last two years.
Mary Ziegler, a University of California,
Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction, believes that Mitchell is trying to gradually build a legal basis for blocking people from traveling out of state for abortions, even though people have a right to interstate travel.
“I think that what Mitchell is doing is trying to operate in a legal gray area, in the hope that conservative judges who agree with him on the substance of abortion will have enough wiggle room to do what he wants,” Ziegler said. “States have generally not been in the business of trying to criminalize acts that are legal in other states; that’s not something we’ve seen a lot of. So there’s not a lot of guidance from the courts about how we’re going to resolve these questions, because no one has really forced us to answer them until now.”
The case may also prove to be a test of blue cities’ power to support abortion rights within red states. Since Roe fell in 2022, liberal cities like Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee, have advanced proposals to protect abortion rights against their states’ sweeping abortion bans. Scores of local prosecutors, meanwhile, have pledged to refrain from prosecuting people for seeking, providing or supporting abortions.
Texas has already begun to strike back against local officials’ attempts to step out of line: last month, it enacted a law that aimsto punish prosecutors who do not enforce the state’s abortion ban.
While the city of San Antonio and some of its officials are the only defendants in the lawsuit, the anti-abortion activists are also asking that a number of organizations be barred from receiving taxpayer money from the reproductive justice fund. Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas, which supports immigrant and undocumented pregnant and postpartum people of color, is one of those organizations; so is Jane’s Due Process, which helps young people navigate anti-abortion laws.
Jaymie Cobb, the interim executive director for Jane’s Due Process, said that she was disappointed by the lawsuit, but not surprised.
“We are waiting to see what happens, waiting to see what the city of San Antonio does, before we make a move – if we make a move at all,” Cobb said.