'Abolished from coast to coast': Anti-abortion movement looks to cities as target for bans

Jana May was at a barbecue dinner for a local politician in Lubbock, Texas, in 2020 when she first heard about the wave of ironclad abortion laws being pushed in the state.

At the time, May, then president of the High Plains Republican women, had no idea what a sanctuary city was until a fellow dinner guest explained to her that movement was afoot to get one established in Lubbock. "When he did, I mean, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up," May, 67, said.

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Across the country, 67 cities and seven counties have passed so-called "sanctuary cities for the unborn" ordinances — local laws that seek to ban abortions in the area. The means vary by community, with some blocking the shipment of drugs used to perform an abortion and others making it punishable to perform or aid in an abortion on their residents.

Lubbock, a town in northwest Texas of about 260,000 people, passed their own ordinance by citywide vote in 2021, a year after May’s dinner conversation.

The Lone Star State has been the testing ground for conservative efforts to scale back abortion access nationwide. And in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision nearly two years ago reversing the federal right to an abortion, these ordinances have spread beyond Texas, into neighboring states like New Mexico and even liberal strongholds like Illinois.

The debate over abortion rights stands to be a key issue in this year’s elections, whether on the ballot or the top of voters’ minds. As local and legal challenges mount, the battles have already begun in cities and towns across America.

May returned home that evening back in 2020 to Amarillo, Texas, about 120 miles straight north of Lubbock. She remembers crying the whole way.

“I knew that God was telling me that I needed to bring it to Amarillo,” May said.

She started the push for an ordinance in the town that had been her home since 1976 by gathering community support. May also got in touch with east Texas pastor and prominent anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson, inviting him to Amarillo.

As a leader of the sanctuary city movement, Dickson has traveled to areas across Texas and the country since 2019, after he helped push through the first of these ordinances in Waskom, Texas, a small town of 2,000 sitting on the Louisiana border.

The end goal, he said: abolishing abortion in all 50 states.

“From the beginning, I have said that this is not going away. And it's just apparent that this is all coming to a head,” he said.

Coming to a head in Amarillo

May and Dickson's fight to pass an ordinance in Amarillo has been years in the making and is still ongoing.

After multiple city council meetings that failed to produce any concrete legislation, a group of Amarillo citizens started a petition to force a council vote or get the ordinance on the ballot for voters to decide.

The group has until April to gather just over 5,500 signatures. With the help of several churches in the area, Dickson and May say they are confident they have the community's support.

Opponents say the ordinance has no place in Amarillo.

“This is a policy that not only no one needs, but no one asked for, and that's being astroturfed from out of town extremists," said Rachel O'Leary Carmona, executive director of Women's March and an Amarillo resident since 2021.

Carmona and other local activists like Lindsay London, one of six Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance leaders, have led the response against the ordinance, meeting with the city leaders and speaking at public meetings.

"This represents a small percentage of a very extreme set of viewpoints. And it's not what the public truly wants," London said of the initiative.

'Litmus test'

Amarillo stands to be a "litmus test" for the sanctuary city movement, said Mary Ziegler, professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law.

A conservative city of about 200,000 at the center of the rural Texas Panhandle, Amarillo might appear an easy target for anti-abortion efforts.

“In the most simple terms possible, you could say that Amarillo is in the reddest part of the reddest state in the country," O'Leary Carmona said. "And if you didn't scratch any further than that, I think that's just where the matter would lie."

Abortion as an issue has crossed party lines, including in Ohio, where voters turned out last November in favor of a ballot measure to enshrine abortion access in the red state's constitution.

Texas has some of the country's strictest abortion laws on the books, banning the procedure from the moment of conception with few exceptions for the life of the mother.

Still, the sanctuary city ordinance in Amarillo — which Dickson and May say would close remaining "loopholes" in state laws — risks rubbing locals the wrong way, London said.

“Amarillo is very much a place that's kind of like the cornerstone Texas mentality: We don't like being told what to do," she said. "We don't want outsiders coming in trying to meddle in our business. And (Dickson) very much has his eyes set on Amarillo as a trophy.”

Dickson, 38, has made Amarillo his current home base and told USA TODAY he plans to be in the city until the ordinance passes.

But he said the panhandle town is just "part of the puzzle" and that he's already looking to future places, in Texas as well as other states, from California to Virginia.

“We see abortion as an evil ... And we want to see it abolished from coast to coast," Dickson said.

Getting abortion back in front of the Supreme Court

Dickson’s local law movement relies on the backing of federal statutes.

This includes the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing "lewd or lascivious" material, including abortion drugs and equipment. Activists like Dickson argue the nineteenth century obscenity law is a de facto federal abortion ban that just needs enforcing.

And referring to it and other federal acts in the local ordinances, Ziegler said, creates the opportunity for the Supreme Court to potentially weigh in.

“Basically, they want to lob as many balls toward the Court in that effort as possible," Ziegler said. “Each ordinance they pass, they think is an opportunity for the Court to draw that conclusion.”

Ziegler says the ordinances are a "win, win" for Dickson and other anti-abortion advocates. While the laws generally serve to deter people from seeking an abortion in the first place, if someone were to go through with the procedure in violation of the ordinance, they create the possibility for an escalating legal battle.

"Now that there is no federal right to choose abortion, the ordinances have become places where you're seeing experiments toward the recognition of a nationwide ban on abortion," Ziegler said.

In June, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that guaranteed the right to an abortion.

Dickson called it “inevitable” that the abortion debate wind up back in front of the nation’s highest court, where a conservative majority sits.

Or by Trump

The anti-abortion movement also has eyes on the White House and former Republican President Donald Trump.

The Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank that includes the Trump administration’s Office of Civil Rights Director Roger Severino — has proposed the former president, if reelected this November, force the issue through executive order.

Fellow Trump ally Gene Hamilton has made similar suggestions, calling for the next conservative administration to use the Comstock Act to enforce a federal ban.

“It's Trump proxies from Trump World saying this stuff,” Ziegler said. “I think that tells you a lot, right. It's not just random, anti-abortion groups that are not close to Trump. These are people who have had Trump's ear, who are really close to him, saying that this is what he should do."

Someone else who has Trump's ear, Jonathan Mitchell has worked closely with Dickson to craft the local ordinances.  More recently, he represented the former president before the Supreme Court in Trump's challenge to stay on the Colorado ballot.

Whether by the Supreme Court or presidency, proponents for a federal ban see their routes to bypass Congress and state governments, Ziegler said.

“You don't need voters to agree with you,” Ziegler said. “They're essentially looking to win in places where they have the home field advantage.”

Fight spreads beyond Texas

Dickson has found that home field advantage outside the Lone Star State, too.

A thousand miles from the Texas Panhandle, in the blue state of Illinois, residents of Danville gathered last May for what turned into an hours-long city council meeting and debate over their own sanctuary city ordinance.

Austin Lazzell was one of many speakers that night. A 29-year-old HVAC technician and lifelong Danville resident, Lazzell spoke in favor of the ordinance, which came as a response to a new abortion clinic moving into town.

Lazzell told the story of the birth of his third daughter, during which he said he and his wife drove 45 minutes through a blizzard in the early morning hours to reach a hospital in Champaign, Illinois, since there was nowhere in Danville to deliver a baby.

“My critique on having the abortion clinic brought to our area: We're a border city in the state ... anybody in Indiana that can't have that in that state would be rushing over here purely just to kill their unborn child in a city in which we at the time weren't even able to have a child born,” said Lazzell.

Clinic owner, LaDonna Prince, said when she was looking for a location for her second abortion clinic, Affirmative Care Solutions, Danville’s proximity to the Indiana border was exactly what drew her to the town.

Intending to serve women in both states, Prince said she made the move to Danville anticipating that her first operation, Clinic for Women in Indianapolis, might be forced to close.

“The thought process behind this, when it started, was knowing that Indiana's a red state and that things probably were not going to go our way,” Prince said. “And as it turned out, we were correct.”

Indiana enacted a near-total abortion ban in August.

'Unenforceable': Debate continues past ordinance passage

Back in Danville, Lazzell said he felt like residents’ opinions on the ordinance split right down the middle — which is exactly how the council's vote fell last May.

The measure, which prohibits the shipment of abortion drugs and tools in the city, eventually passed 8-7, with Mayor Rickey Williams Jr. casting the tiebreak vote. With that, Danville became the most recent city to pass a sanctuary city ordinance.

But the city faced pushback from entities, including the ACLU of Illinois, who say the move clearly violates state law. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker made abortion legal in the state by signing the 2019 Reproductive Health Act.

Meanwhile, Prince's clinic — the legislation's original target — is not operational yet, after an Illinois man drove his car into the building, causing extensive structural damage. The assailant, Philip Buyno, was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison for the attack.

Prince said they still don't have an expected start date but hope to open as soon as possible. And when they do, she said they won't be deterred by the city council’s decision.

"The ordinance is on the books, it's unenforceable,” Prince said. “And I have no problem with them having an unenforceable law on their books indefinitely, if that's what they want to do."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cities targeted with local abortion bans in post-Roe movement