A Texas Democrat’s Abortion Bill Would Also Repeal the State’s Ban on Gender Treatments for Kids

Texas Democrats are calling it an abortion bill. Read to the bottom of it and you’ll find it also wipes out the state’s ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transition surgeries for children.

State Rep. Donna Howard of Austin filed House Bill 126 on Nov. 9, the first day lawmakers could start dropping bills for the 2027 session. Her office announced it the next evening as one of 13 bills “with landmark potential.”

A post from the partisan account Democrats Deliver, headlined “Texas Democrats introduce bill to end the state’s abortion ban,” drew more than 72,000 likes and about 3.5 million views in a day. That’s the version most people saw. The bill text on the Texas Legislature’s own website is a lot longer than a slogan.

Forty-six laws, one list

HB 126 is nine pages. The official caption calls it a bill “relating to repealing or replacing medically unnecessary and outdated health care restrictions.” The heart of it is Section 9, a numbered list of 46 laws and pieces of laws that would simply be repealed.

Some of those are exactly what Democrats advertised. The list repeals Chapter 170A of the Health and Safety Code, the Human Life Protection Act, the 2021 trigger law that banned most abortions once Roe v. Wade fell. It repeals Subchapter H of Chapter 171, the Texas Heartbeat Act, the law that let private citizens sue anyone who helped with an abortion after cardiac activity can be detected. It repeals Chapter 245, the state’s licensing law for abortion clinics.

It also rewrites what the word means. Texas law would define abortion as “a medical intervention provided to individuals who need to end the medical condition of pregnancy.” Pregnancy, in the state code, would become a medical condition to be ended.

The part that isn’t about abortion

Item 10 on the repeal list is “Subchapter X, Chapter 161, Health and Safety Code, as added by Chapter 335 (S.B. 14), Acts of the 88th Legislature, Regular Session, 2023.”

That’s Senate Bill 14. Texas passed it in 2023, and it bars doctors from putting minors on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or performing transition surgeries on them. The Texas Supreme Court upheld it. Item 37 on the same list repeals a second SB 14 provision in the state’s Medicaid law.

Howard’s bill doesn’t stop there. Section 2 strikes from the Medical Practice Act the rule that a doctor commits a prohibited practice by performing “a gender transitioning or gender reassignment procedure or treatment” in violation of the state ban. So the ban goes, and so does the license penalty for breaking it.

None of that appears in the caption. A voter who only read “restore abortion rights” would have no idea a vote for HB 126 is also a vote to reopen medical transition for Texas kids.

Parents lose their say too

Item 4 repeals Chapter 33 of the Family Code. That’s the law that says a girl under 18 needs a parent’s consent for an abortion, unless a judge signs off or there’s a medical emergency. Section 4 removes the cross-reference to it for foster children, and Section 2 deletes the license penalties for doctors who perform an abortion on a minor without a parent’s written consent or a court order.

Put those pieces together and a 15-year-old in Texas could end a pregnancy without her mother or father ever being told, under a bill her parents were told was about “rights.”

The bill also deletes the rule that kept doctors from performing abortions on a viable baby in the third trimester except in narrow cases, such as saving the mother’s life or a severe, irreversible brain impairment in the child. That exception list is bracketed out of the Occupations Code in Section 2.

Even the word ‘woman’ goes

One line is small, and it tells you a lot. Texas has a law covering treatment for postpartum depression, defined as a disorder in which “a woman experiences moderate to severe depression following a pregnancy.” Section 6 of HB 126 strikes “a woman” and writes in “an individual.”

Only women get pregnant. Texas law says so plainly today, and this bill would scrub it out of a statute written to help new mothers.

On Wednesday, pro-life activist Christin Bentley posted a list of all 46 repeal provisions and dared people to “read them for yourselves.” That’s good advice. The text is public and short, and the scariest parts are in plain English.

It still has to get through the Senate

The bill has a long road. Democrats will run the Texas House when the session opens in January, but Republicans still hold the state Senate, and nothing becomes law without both chambers. If it somehow passed, the bill says it would take effect Sept. 1, 2027.

That makes HB 126 less a law in waiting than a statement of what Texas Democrats want. Howard put it first in her own list of landmark bills. Her side is promoting it as a simple fix for women.

Republican senators now get to make the other case in public, line by line: a bill sold on abortion that also hands back puberty blockers to minors, cuts parents out of their daughters’ decisions and deletes the word “woman” from a mothers’ health law. They won’t need to exaggerate anything. They can just read it out loud.