NASHVILLE, Tennessee (LifeSiteNews) — The Tennessee Legislature has passed a bill to empower civil actions against those who ship illegal abortion pills into the state, awaiting only the governor’s final decision to become law.
As amended, Senate Bill 419 defines “catastrophic loss or injury” in civil suits to “include wrongful death of an unborn child at any stage of gestation in utero when mifepristone or misoprostol is sent directly to a patient by a defendant via courier, delivery, or mail service in violation of law,” punishable by $1 million in damages.
“The overturning of Roe v. Wade marked an important step in the fight to eliminate abortion in the United States, but our work is far from finished,” said the bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Gino Bulso. “Tennessee already has strong pro-life laws on the books, but tragically, mail-order abortions continue to kill thousands of innocent unborn children every year. It’s time we end the slaughter once and for all and recognize that each of us is made in the image of God. This legislation’s passage is a critical step in our efforts to promote life, protect women and ensure morality defines our laws.”
WKRN reports that the bill has cleared both the state House and Senate, and now requires only the approval of Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who generally supports pro-life legislation.
“We are actually creeping back up to the pre-Roe v. Wade levels because abortion pills are being mailed in the state, so this seemed like an appropriate time to take action,” Bulso added, citing data that Tennessee abortions actually rose 30% from 2024 to 2025, reaching more than 7,500 last year.
Mailing pills such as mifepristone across state lines has become abortion lobby’s most important tool for perpetuating abortion-on-demand and undermining pro-life laws, thanks to the difficulty of tracking pills shipped in nondescript packaging and pills usually taken in complete privacy.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, which Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills.
This flood was unleashed by former President Joe Biden, who, after the fall of Roe, instituted rule changes allowing abortion pills to be dispensed without an in-person doctor’s visit and choosing not to enforce federal law against mailing them across state lines. However, during his 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump declared he would not reverse that decision. Pro-lifers were given hope in May 2025 that the White House’s position might change when U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (another formerly pro-abortion figure who “moderated” during his own presidential bid) promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.
But no conclusions or timetable have since been announced, prompting frustration among pro-lifers, which has only intensified with the federal government’s attempts to quash pro-life lawsuits against the FDA’s permissive abortion pill rules.