Last night, three whole entire men out of 314,000 Lubbock County residents made the county the latest (and largest) in Texas to pass an abortion travel bounty-hunter ordinance allowing just any asshole anywhere to bring a civil suit against anyone who they believe “knowingly” transports a pregnant person through “the unincorporated area of Lubbock County” for the “purpose of providing or obtaining an elective abortion” (and by “transporting” they also mean funding abortion travel).

You can read the text of the ordinance itself here; some of the coverage has been a little misleading. The ordinance, passed by a trio of Lubbock County commissioners, does not “ban” pregnant people from traveling through Lubbock County for abortion care — pregnant people are technically exempt from being sued directly under the ordinance, though we’ll get into what that actually means in a second.

Instead, the ordinance, which is modeled on Texas’ broader SB8 abortion ban, sets up a civil penalty structure allowing literally anyone to sue somebody else for at least $10,000, plus attorneys’ fees and “nominal and compensatory damages” if they think that person has helped a pregnant person pass through Lubbock County to get an abortion.

This for-profit, “private right of action” enforcement structure started off years ago as the anti-abortion lobby’s novel legal gambit to sidestep the inconvenience of pregnant people having rights under the U.S. Constitution, which made state enforcement of pre-viability abortion bans untenable under Roe v. Wade. By taking state enforcement out of the picture and shifting the big-brother responsibilities on to, well, people’s literal big brothers, the anti-abortion lobby was able to ban abortion in Texas before the summer 2022 Dobbs decision.

But even post-Dobbs, the Constitution remains a problem for the anti-abortion lobby and those freedom-loving fascists at the Federalist Society, as it’s not absolutely clear that SCOTUS is prepared to greenlight bans on interstate travel for abortion. (Though, frankly, I’m not convinced this SCOTUS is much concerned with things like constitutionality and the rule of law.) Instead of banning interstate travel, the folks behind the Lubbock (and similar) ordinances are hoping to convince rural county commissioners and other hyperlocal government entities to adopt these privately enforced, intra-county or even intra-city travel bans for abortion support.

I hesitate to give this fuckery air time — I’m sure the backers of abortion support travel bans are thrilled with any and all coverage, even/especially the most hand-wringing stuff — because I think Comstock Act enforcement and the Texas mifepristone suit are more actively pressing threats to more people across the country as a whole. There are a lot of advantages to ginning up alarmism and outrage around these intra-geographic abortion support travel bans for the folks behind them, and not only because the publicity is quality fodder for their next round of fundraising (though that has a lot to do with it).

If in fact it was their goal, there are a lot of ways the anti-abortion lobby, anti-abortion politicians, and anti-abortion religious groups could go about decreasing the number of abortions or, especially, mitigating the factors that cause people to seek abortions when they might not do so if they felt more supported in pursuing pregnancy and parenting. (To be clear, I think there should be exactly as many abortions as people who need abortions need to have them. Abortion is a social good, bodily autonomy is a human right, and no one should be forced by the government or anyone else to become or stay pregnant against their will.) They could increase funding for and access to contraception, instead of doing the opposite. They could increase funding for and access to medicine- and evidence-based sexual education for people of all ages, and especially young folks, instead of doing the opposite. They could increase funding for and access to programs that address maternal mortality, instead of doing the opposite. They could increase funding for and access to family social safety net and entitlement programs, instead of doing the opposite.

But rather than doing any of that, they’re pushing for mostly symbolic, privately enforced local ordinances (and hoping you forget about Comstock and the Texas mife case). Here’s why:

• Abortion support travel bans foment fear and incite terror and uncertainty for and among people who need abortions and — importantly — the family, friends, and community members who love and support them. A fearful populace is compliant, submissive, and obedient to Republican, patriarchal, Christian governance, and such a populace encourages compliance, submission, and obedience to such governance in others. Fearful people may try to dissuade their loved ones from doing what’s right for them (ending a pregnancy) out of a sense of protectiveness, or decline to support others in accessing abortion out of a fear of being targeted themselves. The folks behind these travel bans are, at the same time, looking to build lists of abortion supporters in an attempt to scare people like you and me out of using our money, resources, and voices to access abortion and help other people do so.
• Abortion support travel bans allow bullies who stand to benefit monetarily from suing over other people’s abortions to (re)present themselves as victims. It is hard to overstate how essential the conceit of imagined victimhood is to the core identity of right-wing and Republican politicians and voters these days. They are desperate to cast themselves as the helpless prey of vicious aggressors such as: trans teens, books about Black people and queer families, migrant toddlers, women experiencing pregnancy loss, and, now, people driving on public roads. This is classic “you made me do this” abuser logic, flipping the roles of aggressor and victim in order to legitimize and centralize power in the hands of people who already have more of it than most.
• Abortion support travel bans create a culture of neighbor-on-neighbor surveillance, complete with a profit incentive. People who are divided, afraid of each other, suspicious of each other, and who are rewarded for believing the worst about their community members are easier to control, and easier to coerce into controlling others. It helps if those most likely to feel entitled to police their neighbors’ reproductive decisions for profit are also more likely to be heavily armed or unvaccinated, making them especial threats to vulnerable community members.
• Abortion support travel bans criminalize pregnant people and entangle them in costly, and often public, legal proceedings, even when pregnant people are technically excepted from being sued for ending their pregnancies. Reporters aren’t wrong to note that these travel bans ostensibly exempt pregnant people in lieu of targeting the friends, family members, loved ones, and funders who assist them in accessing abortion. But it doesn’t take a great legal mind to see that abortion support and abortion care bans necessarily entangle people who have abortions in litigation, too. Any lawsuit against someone who ostensibly assisted a loved one in accessing abortion will need to show that an abortion occurred, which will involve investigating the pregnant person who had the abortion to find out when, where, and how the abortion occurred. This is why reporters absolutely must ask anti-abortion politicians not just what kinds of abortion bans they prefer, but how they intend to enforce those bans.
• Abortion support travel bans shore up the already existing and ever-expanding surveillance-state apparatus used to target, prosecute, and criminalize people who have abortions and those who support them. When people are targeted by law enforcement for their pregnancy outcomes, those cases most often begin with “health-care professionals, social workers, and acquaintances.”

Perhaps most importantly: abortion support travel bans never need to be enforced or realized to have the above effects. They are resoundingly ineffective as laws, but incredibly effective as threats. That’s why they’re so appealing to the anti-abortion lobby; they needn’t withstand legal scrutiny. They merely need to terrify their targets and feed the misogynist fantasies of anti-abortion vigilantes.

Recent data shows that, nationwide, clinical abortions increased slightly in the year after the fall of Roe. This is likely due in no small part to the availability of medication abortion via telemedicine; we can certainly expect anti-abortion folks to expand their already prodigious efforts to outlaw medication abortion going forward. Doing so will have a much more significant effect on abortion access in the U.S. than any county- or city-level abortion support travel bans. We should remain clear-eyed about the most realistic and pressing threats to abortion access, while also staying aware of the cultural and political work that headline-grabbing abortion support travel bans do — without aiding and abetting their backers by creating more fear and spreading misinformation.

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