NASHVILLE, Tennessee (LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced legislation that would impose crushing financial penalties on anyone involved with mailing abortion pills into the state to prevent the practice from circumventing the state’s ban on the procedure.
Live Action reported that HB 26, the Unborn Child Protection Act of 2025, would make “any person or entity” mailing or delivering “an abortion inducing drug” into Tennessee “strictly liable in the amount of five million dollars in damages for the death of the unborn child.” Manufacturers, distributors, online stores, and any individual who directs somebody to them would all be covered.
“I learned that there were some young ladies in Tennessee who had ordered and received abortion pills through the mail,” said Republican state Rep. Gino Bulso, the bill’s lead sponsor. “I began thinking about what else we might be able to do, both to deter folks from breaking the law and to provide a civil remedy to the family of an unborn child who’s killed because abortion pills were illegally sent into the state (…) It’s broader than just exposing manufacturers and distributors to liability. It imposes liability on any person or company who actually sends abortion pills or delivers abortion pills into the state for the purpose of killing an unborn child.”
Tennessee currently has a trigger law banning abortion from pregnancy except in cases of physical medical emergencies, which has led to the shuttering of all Planned Parenthood abortion facilities in the state. But the abortion lobby has realized that no state can truly be abortion-free as long as abortion pills can be mailed into them and taken in private, prohibitions of which are much harder to enforce.
Abortion pills carry distinct risks to women who take them, especially when done so without medical oversight. A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
Pro-lifers warn that with the Biden administration’s complete removal of requirements that abortion pills be taken in the presence of a medical professional, meaning without any medical supervision or medical support close by, those events are certain to increase.
Despite that, however, and despite taking abortion pills without medical supervision increasing their risks, returning President Donald Trump says he will not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing an unprecedented change first made by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and restored the elected branches of government’s right to decide abortion policy through the democratic process, 13 states ban most abortions, with lesser restrictions and regulations on the books in numerous others.
In response, Democrats and the abortion lobby have been working feverishly to reinforce abortion “access” through a variety of strategies. Among them are mailing pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, placing abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.