House Committee Pulls Plug Abruptly
on Hearing for Abortion Homicide Bill
Capitol Inside
April 23, 2025
The Lone Star State lost some luster as a pro-life hotbed on Tuesday after Republicans who control the Texas House cancelled a hearing that had been set for a measure that would make it possible to brand women who have abortions as murderers with death by lethal injection as potential punishment.
Rookie Republican State Rep. Brent Money of Greenville revealed on social media that the abortion criminalization proposal that he's sponsoring in House Bill 2197 was yanked from the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee consideration schedule the previous evening without an explanation for the snub.
Money wasn't sure who to blame for the bill's apparent demise after the panel's chairman - Republican State Rep. John Smithee of Amarillo - claimed that Speaker Dustin Burrows' team made the call while House leaders pointed the finger back at him for the proposal's eleventh-hour scuttling.
But HB 2197 encountered apparently insurmountable opposition from an unlikely source with the anti-abortion group Texas Alliance for Life leading the charge to kill it. The organization sent out alerts in cell phone texts the night before the scheduled hearing urging supporters to contact their representatives to express their opposition to the Money bill.
HB 2197 would add the early termination of pregnancies to the list of actions that could be prosecuted as homicides. Babies that are aborted would be classified as "unborn victims" in the proposal that Money hatched with 20 GOP colleagues as co-authors.
Thirteen supporting sponsors for HB 2197 are in the midst of their first terms as state lawmakers. Eighteen of the measure's sponsors including Money opposed Burrows' election as the chamber's top leader in January. Some if not all of them could find it tough to pass any legislation during their House debuts this year.
Money thought he had a chance for success with the abortion homicide proposal when it popped up on the committee hearing schedule for Tuesday. House leaders rarely set a bill for a committee hearing and vote if they think it has a chance to fail on the floor. Money had filed 26 bills. Twenty-five of those have been languishing in committees and could be destined to die from neglect.
The only Money proposal that doesn't fit that description deals with children in foster homes. But it's not a far-right priority with a Democrat sponsoring a similar proposal in the Senate. HB 2197 - however - appears to be on life support at best at this point.
Money and the abortion murder plan's other supporters said they felt bad for advocates who'd traveled to Austin for the hearing. Unsubstantiated theories on the on-again, off-again HB 2197 committee hearing sizzled at the statehouse on Wednesday.
Smithee is one of several committee chairs who voted for GOP State Rep. David Cook of Mansfield in the leadership election that Burrows won on opening day of the regular session in the face of opposition from 52 Republicans and three Democrats. Smithee could have set the hearing on the bill without consulting the speaker's team first.
Some lawmakers and others have speculated that House leaders were trying to send a message with the scrapping of HB 2197 from Tuesday's hearing. But Money responded by imploring the bill's supporters to express their anger and sadness about the development to God.
"I ask all Christians and pro-life Texans to pray," Money said in a post on X. "Pray for hearts and minds to be changed. Pray for opportunities to have meaningful discussions with those who disagree. Pray for men and women of courage to be elected to office. Pray that America will one day see abortion as the wretched scourge that it is."
Texas GOP lawmakers appeared to be anti-abortion pioneers in 2021 when the Legislature approved a landmark measure that banned abortions here after six weeks of pregnancy. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Texas law - and the so-called heartbeat bill became a model for abortion prohibitions in other states.
But Texas is one of nine states where lawmakers have proposed laws that would classify abortion as homicide.
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