This November 5, the citizens of Amarillo (pop. 202,408) are considering an ordinance that would, if passed, further outlaw abortion and declare their city a “sanctuary city for the unborn.”
If the ordinance passes, the City of Amarillo will become the 53rd city in the State of Texas and the 70th city in the nation to pass a Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance. The City of Amarillo would also become the sixth pro-life ballot victory in the State of Texas since the initiative began, following victories in the City of Lubbock in May of 2021 and the Cities of Abilene, San Angelo, Plainview, and Athens in November of 2022.
If the ordinance fails to pass by Amarillo voters voting AGAINST Prop A, the City of Amarillo will become the first city in the State of Texas where voters have rejected an anti-abortion ordinance. While supporters of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn (SCFTU) effort are hopeful a victory will be obtained in Amarillo, the amount of misleading statements concerns many as falsehood tends to spread faster than truth.
On October 13, KAMR in Amarillo ran a story on the High Plains Homepage titled, Explainer: Amarillo and the ‘Sanctuary City for the Unborn’ Ordinance on the November 2024 ballot. The story was written by Caden Keenan. While this article does not address every misleading statement in Keenan’s article, the following is a response to some of the misleading statements found in Keenan’s article.
MISLEADING STATEMENT #1: Keenan writes, “The ordinance does not make an exception for instances in which an abortion might be pursued because of a serious fetal health issue, such as a lack of brain development or other issues that would lead to an infant’s death shortly after birth. Because that is not clarified in the ordinance text, those types of circumstances would count among what the ordinance considers elective abortions, which it defines as ‘any abortion that is not performed or induced in response to a medical emergency.’”
RESPONSE TO MISLEADING STATEMENT #1: The proposed Amarillo Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance is in line with the laws of the State of Texas and the rulings of the Supreme Court of Texas. The laws of the State of Texas do not allow for abortions in cases of fetal anomalies, like anencephaly, and the Supreme Court of Texas has already opined on this issue. On May 31, 2024, the Supreme Court of Texas issued its ruling in Zurawski v. State of Texas, a case brought by several women who were denied abortions because their doctors were afraid of violating the laws of the State of Texas. Several of these cases directly addressed anencephalic pregnancies.
Samantha Casiano, the eighth plaintiff in the case, testified to being twenty weeks pregnant when an ultrasound revealed that her daughter had anencephaly. Since her doctor would not perform the abortion due to the laws of the State of Texas. Casiano carried her daughter for three more months, her daughter was born, and her daughter died four hours later in Casiano’s arms. Dr. Austin Dennard, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Dallas, was the ninth plaintiff in the case. Dr. Dennard testified to being eleven weeks pregnant when her ultrasound revealed that her baby had anencephaly and she chose to travel out of state to receive an abortion.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented Casiano and Dr. Dennard, argued before the trial court that an abortion should be allowed when an unborn child is diagnosed with a condition that is unlikely to sustain life after birth. However, the Supreme Court of Texas rejected their arguments, determining that the law of the State of Texas did not allow for an abortion “based solely on a diagnosis that an unborn child has an abnormal condition, even a life-limiting one.”
The Supreme Court of Texas opined that the law of the State of Texas only allows the abortion of an unborn child diagnosed with anencephaly when, “in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.”
This leads to the question, “If the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance is in full alignment with the State of Texas and the Supreme Court of Texas on ‘instances in which an abortion might be pursued because of a serious fetal health issue’ then why even mention it?” Is this an attempt of the author to express their disagreement with the laws of the State of Texas and the rulings of the Supreme Court of Texas? Furthermore, what was the purpose of Keenan linking to a study written by Katrina Kimport and published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health titled, Is third-trimester abortion exceptional? Two pathways to abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy in the United States? Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health is a publication that was published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Guttmacher Institute—a research organization that was originally founded as a part of Planned Parenthood.
The inclusion of this paragraph and the linked study should not even be a part of an article explaining the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance.
MISLEADING STATEMENT #2: Keenan writes, “ …Dickson and the other authors of the ordinance noted repeatedly that enforcing the ordinance has never truly been the point.”
RESPONSE TO MISLEADING STATEMENT #2: The Texas Heartbeat Act is a law that can be enforced by private citizens filing a lawsuit against anyone who violates the law. If the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance is adopted by the citizens of Amarillo, then it too will be a law that can be enforced by private citizens filing a lawsuit against anyone who violates the law. The fact that the law can be enforced, if necessary, is the point. On May 1, 2021, the citizens of Lubbock passed a SCFTU Ordinance by popular vote. The Lubbock SCFTU Ordinance was set to go into effect on June 1, 2021. The Planned Parenthood Surgical Center, which was performing abortions, had a choice to make. On June 1, 2021, Planned Parenthood complied with the Lubbock SCFTU Ordinance and stopped performing elective abortions. Had they continued to perform elective abortions and violated the ordinance they would have likely been sued into oblivion, but they were smart and stopped performing elective abortions.
MISLEADING STATEMENT #3: Keenan writes, “A lawsuit can also be brought against a person up to six years after the date of the inciting incident . . . What does that mean in practice? Consider a hypothetical scenario: In 2020, an Amarillo woman who is 18 weeks pregnant is informed by her doctor that her unborn child has developed the acrania-exencephaly-anencephaly sequence, when a lack of a skull leads to the destruction of fetal brain tissue. These are lethal disorders, meaning that babies who experience them cannot survive for very long after birth because of a lack of a skull and the upper portion of the brain. The woman decides to abort the pregnancy instead of waiting for five months, risking further developing health complications, to give birth to and immediately bury her child. Her doctor refers her to a healthcare facility in New Mexico that can provide for her care, and she makes an appointment. She and her husband travel to New Mexico and stay with a family member during the week of the abortion procedure. After the procedure, the woman and her husband take the remains of the child back to Amarillo to hold a burial service at a family plot. In 2025, a different relative of the woman could bring a lawsuit under Amarillo’s ‘Sanctuary City for the Unborn’ ordinance against: The woman’s husband; The doctor in Amarillo; The doctor in New Mexico who performed the procedure; The relative who housed the woman and her husband during the week of the procedure; and The funeral director who coordinated the burial service, among others. In court, according to the ordinance, none of those people would be able to pose defenses including that the woman consented to the abortion, that the ordinance did not exist at the time of the abortion, that abortion was and is legal in New Mexico, or that the woman had a right to bury her child in accordance with her beliefs.”
RESPONSE TO MISLEADING STATEMENT #3: While Keenan gets it right when Keenan states, “A lawsuit can also be brought against a person up to six years after the date of the inciting incident,” Keenan misleads the public by promoting the idea that the ordinance is retroactive. The entire hypothetical scenario presented by Keenan misrepresents the ordinance. The idea that someone could be penalized in 2025 for an action that took place in 2020 under an ordinance that did not go into effect until 2024 would be wholly unconstitutional. The proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance only allows lawsuits for violations that have taken place AFTER the ordinance has been passed and AFTER the ordinance goes into effect, not before. This hypothetical situation mentioned by Keenan, which is over 300 words in length, is over 300 words of misleading statements.
MISLEADING STATEMENT #4 Later in the article, Keenan returns to the subject of the private enforcement mechanism. Keenan writes, “this ordinance written to enable civil enforcement was, at the same time, never intended to be brought to court. ‘If I wanted to see it end up in a courtroom,’ commented Dickson, ‘It would’ve been written differently.’”
RESPONSE TO MISLEADING STATEMENT #4 Here Keenan appears to confuse lawsuits that would be brought against those in violation of the ordinance with lawsuits that would be brought against the City of Amarillo in order to stop the ordinance. The proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance was written to survive a legal challenge. If the City of Amarillo were sued, the lawsuit would most likely be dismissed, just like the lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood against the City of Lubbock was dismissed. It is inaccurate to say the ordinance was written to “never” bring people to court. The proposed Amarillo ordinance gives citizens the ability to file a lawsuit against anyone in violation of the ordinance. While a security officer at a bank hopes he never has to use his gun, it is there if he needs it. The same can be said about the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance. While a citizen would hope they would never have to file a lawsuit, it is there if they need it.
MISLEADING STATEMENT #5: Keenan writes, “…[W]hile Dickson said he didn’t write the ordinance with the intent of someone being brought to court and no lawsuits have been brought under similar ordinances, recent actions by another author of the Texas Heartbeat Act – the law that made those ordinances possible – may make him incorrect. Jonathan Mitchell, the former solicitor general of Texas and a major architect of the Texas Heartbeat Act, has been involved in multiple lawsuits since 2023 focused on seeking damages according to the state law he helped put in place. In 2023, Mitchell filed a lawsuit against three women who a Galveston man believed helped his ex-wife obtain an abortion . . . legal actions like those brought by Mitchell may test the enforcement mechanism of the state law and its related ordinances, as well as potentially threaten a person’s legal ability to leave Texas to seek medical care.”
RESPONSE TO MISLEADING STATEMENT #5: Keenan is, once again, confused. The Galveston lawsuit cannot test the private “enforcement mechanism” of the Texas Heartbeat Act or its “related ordinances.” This is because the Galveston lawsuit was brought under Texas’ wrongful death statute, not the Texas Heartbeat Act or a SCFTU Ordinance. This case mentioned by Keenan, which is over 140 words in length, has nothing to do with the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance.
What Would Amarillo’s Proposed SCFTU Ordinance Do?
Amarillo’s proposed SCFTU Ordinance, represented on the ballot as Prop A, contains six prohibitions seeking to close six major loopholes in Texas anti-abortion laws.
Those six prohibitions are, as follows:
(1) prohibit performing elective abortions and aiding or abetting elective abortions under local law by extending the private enforcement mechanism found in the Texas Heartbeat Act to the point of conception,
(2) prohibit elective abortions on residents of Amarillo, and the abortion trafficking of such residents, outside the State of Texas,
(3) prohibit the abortion trafficking of an unborn child through the City of Amarillo,
(4) prohibit abortion-inducing drugs from being manufactured, possessed, distributed, mailed, transported, delivered, or provided in any manner to or from any person or location in the City of Amarillo,
(5) prohibit criminal organizations who are violating federal laws prohibiting the mailing and receiving of abortion-inducing drugs and abortion paraphernalia from doing business in the City of Amarillo, and
(6) prohibit the transportation and disposal of the remains of unborn children killed by elective abortions.
In Closing
While many of those advocating for the passage of the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance do not believe that the misleading statements in Keenan’s article are going to cost the election, they do believe that the misleading statements create confusion in the final days of the election.
When Amarillo citizens cast their final votes, one can only hope their votes are cast based on accurate information and not misleading statements. For more information about the proposed Amarillo SCFTU Ordinance visit www.projectdestinyamarillo.com.
This is a commentary published with the author’s permission. If you wish to submit a commentary to Texas Scorecard, please submit your article to submission@texasscorecard.com.
