Shefali Luthra
Reproductive Health Reporter
Published
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The passage of a major bill in Texas threatens the national safety net that has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to get around abortion bans.
House Bill 7 targets health care providers in states like California, New York and Massachusetts who have, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, used telehealth to prescribe abortion pills. Interacting with patients virtually, those providers never leave their home states, which have laws explicitly protecting them from out-of-state prosecution. Those protections hold even if the patient is located in a state with a ban, like Texas. Only eight states — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — have th