Texas did not pass an abortion ban in 2025. It passed a bounty law. The architecture is the point. Read the schematic.
The Bill
House Bill 7, 89th Texas Legislature, Second Called Special Session. Author: Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Plano). Senate sponsor: Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) — the same Bryan Hughes who wrote SB 8 in 2021. Signed by Gov. Abbott September 17, 2025. Effective December 4, 2025.
HB 7 takes the SB 8 mechanism — civil bounty in lieu of criminal enforcement, so the state cannot be sued for an unconstitutional ban — and extends it across state lines. Any private citizen may sue any person — manufacturer, distributor, telehealth provider, mail carrier — who supplies abortion medication to a Texas resident. Minimum damages: $100,000. No cap. No standing requirement. The plaintiff does not need to know the defendant, the patient, or the pill.
The Body It Lands On
A doctor in New York consulting by video. A California pharmacy shipping mifepristone. A Massachusetts nonprofit mailing misoprostol. A FedEx driver. A friend who drives a Texas woman to New Mexico and brings pills back in her purse. HB 7 names them.
It lands on Dr. Margaret Carpenter, the New York physician indicted in Louisiana in February 2025 for an April 2024 telehealth prescription — the first criminal indictment of a doctor across state lines since Dobbs. Governor Hochul invoked New York’s shield law and refused extradition. HB 7 was built to test that refusal in civil court, where the shield is weaker and the judgment is a lien.
It lands on 21% of Texas OB/GYNs who told Manatt Health in 2024 they are considering leaving. It lands on the 49.6% of Texas counties that are now maternity care deserts — no OB, no family physician, no midwife. It lands on the women in those counties whose maternal mortality rate has risen 56% since SB 8.
The Data Underneath
The Roberts Court let SB 8 stand on procedural grounds. Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, December 10, 2021. Providers could sue state licensing officials but not state judges or clerks — leaving the bounty mechanism alive. Chief Justice Roberts, in partial dissent: SB 8 has the “purpose and effect of nullifying” the Court’s own rulings, and the scheme is “not only unusual, but unprecedented.” He filed that opinion and watched four colleagues let it stand. Texas read the dissent as a permission slip.
Then came the corridor. Pastor Mark Lee Dickson and SB 8’s architect Jonathan Mitchell have stitched together 80 Texas cities and 21 counties with “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” ordinances — placed along highways to New Mexico, so a woman driving for care crosses three jurisdictions where the driver can be sued before she leaves the state. HB 7 is the federal-reach version of the same machine.
This is not a state regulating its own residents. This is one state writing law for fifty.
The Diagnosis
The civil bounty is Reconstruction-era technology. After 1865, Southern states could not openly defy the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, so they delegated enforcement to private citizens. Black Codes. Vagrancy statutes. The Klan as a deniable arm of the state. The federal government had power over states; it had no power over neighbors. Ported forward 160 years.
The fugitive slave laws are the deeper parallel. In 1850, Congress required free states to return people who had escaped slavery — and deputized private citizens, in the free states, to do it. The Roberts Court has not yet upheld interstate civil bounties on the merits. Texas is daring it to. Louisiana is daring it to. The sanctuary corridor is daring it to.
They built this on purpose. The schematic is public. We did not look once. We looked 33 times. The same shape emerges every time.
The cruelty is not a side effect. The cruelty is the design.
The Ask
Call your senator. Ask where they stand on a federal shield law for telehealth providers. If they refuse to answer, that is your answer. If you are a physician in a shield state, know your governor’s extradition policy in writing before your next consult. Subscribe at bringtheboltcutters.laboracollective.com. Receipt #4 lands next Friday.
The Roberts Court tied us to the tracks. They forgot we brought bolt cutters. The train is coming. We are not the ones getting hit.
— Yamicia Connor, MD