Current Status - Summary

As of October 2025, Texas continues to show some of the widest gaps in women’s rights protections nationwide. The state maintains one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, has rolled back diversity and equity efforts in education, and recently weakened firearm safety measures by blocking “red flag” laws. Voting access has also tightened through new ID and mail-in ballot rules. While recent legislation aims to stabilize rural hospitals and expand mental-health services, large coverage gaps remain for women—especially in rural and low-income communities.

Things we’re watching: implementation of new rural-health programs under HB 18, the ongoing effects of Texas’s abortion ban on emergency reproductive and maternal care, and whether state leaders revisit Medicaid expansion amid pressure from hospital closures and rising uninsured rates.

Healthcare Access

Texas law continues to take a restrictive stance on reproductive health while showing small, targeted gains in other areas of women’s healthcare.

Reproductive Care: Abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances under state law (SB 8; HB 1280), with limited exceptions for medical emergencies. Enforcement measures—including civil penalties and private lawsuits—have created confusion among providers and delayed care even for patients facing life-threatening complications. In September 2025, HB 7 created a “bounty hunter” provision by giving a monetary award to anyone who brings a lawsuit against abortion pill providers and manufacturers. Postpartum Medicaid coverage was expanded from 2 months to 12 months in 2024, a change that health experts say will save lives in a state with one of the nation’s highest maternal mortality rates.

Broader Healthcare Access: The state has lost more than two dozen rural hospitals since 2010—more than any other state—leaving many counties without full-service facilities. In 2025, lawmakers passed HB 18, a major rural-health bill designed to stabilize hospitals, expand tele-health, and create a new office to support rural hospital finance. For women in rural Texas, this could mean better access to primary care and mental-health support close to home. However, the law also restricts gender-affirming mental-health services for minors and does not close the state’s larger coverage gap: Texas remains one of ten states that have not expanded Medicaid, leaving hundreds of thousands of low-income adults—many of them women—without insurance.

Workplace Rights

Texas has no state-mandated paid family leave for private-sector workers; most parents or caregivers rely on individual employer policies or federal unpaid family leave (FMLA). However, the state expanded sexual-harassment liability in 2021 (SB 45/HB 21), passed the CROWN Act in 2023 to combat hair-based discrimination, and has long been in sync with federal provisions around breastfeeding in the workplace, although day-to-day impact depends on workplace compliance.

Violence and Safety

Women bear the brunt of intimate-partner violence in Texas. In 2023, 205 Texans were killed by intimate partners— 179 were women—with firearms the leading method. In June 2025, Texas enacted the Anti-Red-Flag Act (SB 1362), banning recognition or enforcement of ERPOs, including those from other states. For clarity, an ERPO's main purpose is to temporarily remove firearms from individuals who pose a demonstrated risk of harming themselves or others. Bills to standardize firearm surrender in domestic violence cases have not advanced. All of this adds up to women being less safe in Texas within the context of intimate partner violence.

Voting and Civic Participation

Texas is considered to have some of the most restrictive voter laws in the country. In 2021, SB 1 instituted stricter ID rules for mail-in voting, and in 2025, the state legislature enacted additional election-law changes, including early-voting schedule tweaks, mail-in-voting procedures, and limits on curbside voting. And while the state's voting rules are not gender-targeted, some of the rules may put women at greater risk due to name changes (marriage, divorce):

• Texas’s ID-number matching rules for mail-in ballots have been linked to higher rejection rates when numbers don't match voter files.
• Lawmakers have floated “proof-of-citizenship” registration bills that would require a voter's current legal name to match a passport or birth certificate. A similar bill (the SAVE Act) was debated in Congress earlier this year.

On the plus side, Texas permits political candidates to use political contributions to pay for childcare incurred to participate in campaign activities, helping more parents, and especially women, run.

Education

At public universities, SB 17 (DEI ban) took effect on Jan. 1, 2024, resulting in broad program and staffing cuts related to DEI offices, programs, training, and hiring. These offices often provided referrals or support for sexual violence cases and pregnancy needs. In K-12, HB 900, requiring vendors to rate books as either "sexually explicit or sexually relevant," has caused school districts to remove book titles related to sex-ed, puberty, and menstruation, even though HB 900 is currently blocked by the Fifth Circuit court.