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Texas capital murder case aims to severely punish abortion pill use by treating a fetus as a person [1]
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Date: 2025-07-05
The Texas Rangers did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which must decide whether and how to prosecute the case, has not yet brought its own charges, according to a spokesperson.
Bottles of abortion pills mifepristone, left, and misoprostol, right, at a clinic in Des Moines, Iowa.
Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, a fetus was not considered a person constitutionally. However, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the whole opinion was overruled, including the idea that a fetus does not have the same rights as a person. That did not immediately mean that fetus personhood is established. But, Joanna Grossman, a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, and other experts see Banta’s case as an attempt to move further in that direction.
“The purpose of this has nothing to do with caring whether this woman was victimized, but it's about trying to establish fetal personhood in a more direct way than they've been able to,” said Grossman.
If Banta is convicted and fetal personhood is established in the case, it could complicate a variety of issues, including whether IVF is still legal because it involves destroying unused frozen embryos. Last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are considered children.
“It has implications for all kinds of fertility medicine and it has potential implications for criminal and immigration law,” Grossman said. “If you detain a pregnant woman, are you illegally detaining the fetus who did not commit a crime? If you deport a pregnant woman, are you deporting a U.S. citizen because if we have birthright citizenship, when does that begin?”
John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, says the concerns surrounding the Banta case are misdirected. Texas laws have already established fetal personhood, he said.
What’s important about Banta’s case to him is that it highlights the true danger of abortion pills.
“This case and similar cases really show the absolute danger of the Plan C pills website and the current strategy that Aid Access has to traffic abortion pills into pro-life states without any medical oversight and without any regulation,” Seago said, referring to the online websites that mail abortion pills to every state. He believes a case like Banta’s is just “scratching the surface of how evil this new practice is.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/5/2331145/-Texas-capital-murder-case-aims-to-severely-punish-abortion-pill-use-by-treating-a-fetus-as-a-person?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_1&pm_medium=web
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