Abortion funds languish in legal turmoil, their leaders fearing jail time if they help Texans

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% :Nothing in Texas' tangled web of anti-abortion laws -- including laws from before 1973 and a "trigger law" passed last year -- explicitly outlaws their work paying for Texans to access abortions outside the state.
54% : Ad"The threat of felony prosecution is a real thing," said Elizabeth Myers, a partner at the law firm Thompson Coburn who represents abortion funds.
54% :"We believe that abortion is a fundamental part of health care and that government should cover it, like all other health care," Rodriguez said.
51% : With abortion soon to be entirely inaccessible in Texas, abortion funds will become a more critical resource for Texans who need help leaving the state -- and a more prominent target for anti-abortion advocates trying to stop them.
47% : And anti-abortion advocates are only ramping up their efforts to criminalize abortion in the wake of Friday's ruling.
42% : "The activism over abortion and the end of Roe v. Wade has thrown us into a new legal terrain where we don't have a lot of landmarks."
40% :AdTexas' abortion funds exist because the state does not make abortion easily accessible and affordable, Rodriguez said.
39% :AdLegal landscapeLast week's Supreme Court decision gave Texas' Republican elected officials a victory their party has been working toward for 50 years: the chance to set their own laws banning abortion.
38% : "It's going to be very difficult for anyone to take on the threat of criminal prosecution in order to test these theories because the harm inflicted by the criminal justice system is immediate."
35% : But after last Friday's U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, abortion funds' work came to a screeching halt.
35% : However, Attorney General Ken Paxton said in an advisory Friday that some prosecutors may immediately pursue criminal prosecutions based on violations of Texas abortion laws predating Roe v. Wade that the Legislature never repealed.
34% : And the abortion funds are worried about something far more potentially damaging than a civil suit -- a test case in criminal court.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.