Small-town Texas voters issued a stunning defeat to Mark Lee Dickson and his antiabortion acolytes this November.

This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Feb. 12. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
On Nov. 5, 2024, voters in the Texas Panhandle city of Amarillo resoundingly defeated (59 to 41 percent) a proposition that would have declared their town a “sanctuary city for the unborn.” Amarillo now enjoys the distinction of being the first city in the U.S. where voters rejected a post-Roe abortion travel ban.
Given that antiabortion lawmakers control the state itself, the defeat of Proposition A may appear a Pyrrhic victory (one that is achieved at a great cost). However, it marks a powerful repudiation of Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the antiabortion group Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, and his claims to Llano residents at a town hall that travel bans are desperately needed to stop “baby-murdering abortion cartels” from whisking women and their fetuses across state lines to legally “kill” them, according to The Washington Post.
The protracted battle over the ordinance dates back to July 2023, when Dickson held an “interest meeting” at a church in Amarillo. As Lindsay London, a cofounder of the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance (ARFA) told Ms., he expected a “slam dunk” victory following a string of successes across Texas, especially since Amarillo’s mayor and city council were fiercely antiabortion, and the Panhandle, deeply red.
Things did not go according to Dickson’s plan, due in large measure to the activism of the ARFA. The alliance was launched when six local women—who were variously connected through the local arts scene, community activism and a preexisting reproductive rights group—met at a coffee shop to debrief after Dickson’s presentation, which several of them had attended. Cofounder Fariha Samad says the women immediately recognized that the ordinance posed a threat they needed to take seriously. They set about mobilizing the community to protect reproductive freedom in the Texas Panhandle.
Freedom to move is greatly important. And we should never be in favor of anything that would ever limit that.
Amarillo Mayor Cole Stanley
The ordinance first came before the Amarillo City Council, where the measure was voted down twice following what the Amarillo Tribune described as “nine months of meetings, hours of impassioned public comment, multiple council deliberations, and negotiations with the initiating committee.” As Courtney Brown, one of the six original ARFA members, told the Texas Observer, the group “was persistent in persuading council members that the measure was not only an infringement on bodily autonomy and medical privacy but also an unconstitutional restriction on interstate travel and free speech rights.”
The constitutionality was particularly troubling to Mayor Cole Stanley, a voting member of the council, who told Ms. this past spring that although the council’s obligation to “protect everyone in the community” extended to the “baby within the womb,” the travel ban was jurisdictional overreach. In a press conference, Stanley stressed, “As a conservative who loves the Republic that he lives in, we always want to protect these civil rights and right of travel, right of speech. Freedom to move is greatly important. And we should never be in favor of anything that would ever limit that.”
After failing with the city council, in December 2023, the travel ban’s supporters submitted the ordinance petition to the city. In June 2024, the city council rejected it. At the end of that month, it was submitted to be put on the November ballot; as the election results made clear, the ordinance proved no more popular among Amarilloans than among their city council, no matter that Amarillo is situated in a deep-red county where Donald Trump received about 72 percent of the vote.
Again, the ARFA—with the support of several state organizations, including Avow Texas, the ACLU of Texas and Ground Game Texas—was out front in mobilizing the community to vote no on Proposition A. Reproductive rights supporters were concerned that voters might see the ordinance as little more than a positive expression of the “pro-life” values already embodied in Texas law, rather than, as Samad puts it, the “next component of extreme attempts to restrict access to abortion.” Her organization’s goal, she explains, was to get this message across to voters “without fearmongering or engaging in a frontal attack on anyone’s beliefs about abortion.”
The ARFA’s campaign focused on the most deeply problematic aspects of the proposition’s travel and enforcement provisions, zeroing in on the dangers of the “aid or abet” provision, which would have made it illegal to drive anyone seeking a legal out-of-state abortion through the city of Amarillo. Equally invidious, Prop A would have made it illegal to provide or even offer to provide virtually any kind of support—“informational, logistical, emotional or physical”—to anyone seeking an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy or when a “fetal heartbeat” is detected.
The prohibition extended “extraterritorially” to ensnare those assisting Amarillo residents who were in another state, say on vacation or attending college, when seeking a legal abortion. The ordinance outlawed the provision of abortion care to Amarillo residents “regardless of the law in the jurisdiction where the abortion occurred.”
As members of the AFRA walked blocks and knocked on doors, they often asked voters how they would feel if a loved one turned to them for abortion-related support, and the alternatives were to turn that person away or risk being sued for engaging in illegal conduct. Samad says that most of those she spoke with, including many with antiabortion leanings, expressed serious discomfort over this kind of governmental overreach into their private affairs.
The ARFA homed in on the ordinance’s private enforcement provision, which authorized anyone (other than a governmental official) to file a civil lawsuit against someone whom they suspected of assisting an abortion seeker. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned about Texas’ similar SB 8, this mechanism effectively “has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”
The ARFA warned for a time on its website that “encouraging residents to sue each other … sows distrust and fear. Neighbors who once looked out for one another may now be motivated to spy and report, knowing they can profit from litigation.”
“Love Thy Neighbor”—seen on billboards and yard signs around Amarillo—became the catchphrase of the campaign.
The loss this past November was a stunning defeat for Dickson and his acolytes in Amarillo, which Dickson dubs the “abortion trafficking hub of Texas,” presumably because it is a straight shot into New Mexico, the primary destination for Texans seeking out-of-state abortions. He’s called Amarillo “a key battleground in the national fight over abortion access,” noting, “All across America, people have been paying attention to what’s going on here.”
Key to its ground zero status is that Amarillo is home to a federal courthouse where the staunchly antiabortion Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is the sole jurist. Among other tendentious decisions, Kacsmaryk suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. (The Supreme Court has since dismissed this case on standing grounds.)
This time around, the right of access triumphed.