The Texas Senate unanimously passed a bill on April 2 amending Senate Bill 24 from the 88th Legislative Session, which established the Thriving Texas Families program as a continuation of the state’s Alternatives to Abortions program.
Thriving Texas Families is a “statewide support network” promoting healthy pregnancy and childbirth as an alternative to abortion. It received $140 million in the 2024-25 budget and $180 million when it passed the Senate’s 2026-27 budget.
Senate Bill 1388 defines an “abortion services provider” as a person who facilitates or funds travel, informs or advocates for any abortion-related activity. These definitions would prevent “abortion services providers” from receiving state funds through Thriving Texas Families, but people facilitating access to reproductive health care have called the initiative “wasteful.”
Lynn Cowles, the health and Food Justice Programs manager at advocacy organization Every Texan, said SB 1388 was a way to control the funding for Thriving Texas Families.
“By limiting the number of organizations that are eligible for that funding, it also makes that pool of funding more available to some of the crisis pregnancy centers right now that do qualify,” Cowles said.
The amendment to SB 24 is a political problem that “doesn’t make any policy sense,” said Blake Rocap, the legal services director at Jane’s Due Process, a Texas organization founded in 2001 to help minors confidentially access abortions. With the ban on abortion in Texas, Rocap said, their work at Jane’s Due Process has expanded in recent years outside of Austin and includes sex education, teen parenting support and the delivery of emergency contraception.
City leaders similarly had to “retool” their efforts to focus more on overall reproductive health following the passage of Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions in Texas in 2021, said Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes.
Last year, the city council allocated $400,000 to support Austin residents seeking out-of-state abortions in their 2024-25 budget through the Reproductive Health Grant program. Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the city of Austin in September 2024 in response to the Reproductive Health Grant for “appropriating taxpayer funds.”
“As those lawsuits are litigated in the courtroom, to us it was really important that we continue to focus on the needs of our community,” Fuentes said. “Until there is a change of law, we’ll continue to press forward.”
Dr. Margaret Carpenter, co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, was sued in December 2024 after she was accused of mailing pills from New York to a Texas woman. Julie F. Kay, executive director and fellow co-founder of the coalition, said Texas did not have jurisdiction over Carpenter according to New York law since it operated as a “shield law.” Paxton still enforced a $100,000 penalty in February.
“Why the state of Texas is spending time and money and law enforcement authority on this when the state has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the country, particularly for women of color — that is the question people in Texas should be asking and should be saying, ‘This is not representing us’ if it is not,” Kay said.
Editor’s note: Thriving Texas Families received $180 million when it passed the Senate’s 2026-27 budget as opposed to $90 million originally reported. The Texan regrets this error.
