Florida may send bounty hunters after women and doctors

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Dec 28, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature may turn husbands, fathers and brothers into bounty hunters who can block women from ending unwanted pregnancies.

A new bill filed in the Florida House of Representatives would dangle $100,000 prizes in front of private citizens who are willing to sue in order to stop a pregnant family member from obtaining abortion pills through the mail.

More specifically, House Bill 663 would allow a pregnant woman’s spouse, parents or siblings to sue anyone who tries to send her abortion medication — including doctors who prescribe the pills, drug companies that make them, shipping companies that transport them, even friends or other family members who help arrange delivery.

A successful lawsuit would come with a $100,000 payout — plus extra cash to pay lawyers and legal fees.

The Florida legislation is similar to a first-of-its-kind state law that just took effect in Texas. Right-wing groups have billed the Texas measure as a model for other anti-abortion states — like Florida, which bans most after just six weeks of pregnancy — that now want to stop women from accessing abortion services remotely from states where it is still permitted through telehealth and in-home medication.

Many abortion-supportive states around the country have in recent years enacted what are known as“shield laws.” These are laws that protect patients, doctors and others involved in reproductive healthcare from criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits brought under laws passed in anti-abortion states — just like the kind envisioned in House Bill 663.

But the new Florida bill tries to weaken other states’ shield laws, too.

Shield laws often contain “clawback” provisions that enable someone who provides legal abortion care in their home state — but is then criminally charged or held civilly liable under the laws of another state — to sue in order to recover damages and recoup any costs they incurred in their legal defense.

House Bill 663 would forbid state courts from recognizing or enforcing any judgement issued under another state’s clawback law. What’s more, it would enable someone in Florida who is sued under an out-of-state clawback provision to then countersue in this state.

House Bill 663 wouldn’t enable a father to sue his daughter or a brother to sue his sister; the legislation specifically prohibits lawsuits against a woman trying to obtain abortion medication for herself.

But women are still the true target here. The ultimate goal of legislation like this is to scare providers out of sending abortion pills to women who want them.

As the executive director of the Texas Alliance for Life — one of the anti-abortion groups that supported the new bounty hunter law in Texas — wrote in a recent column, “The ‘chilling effect’ is precisely the point.”

This is at least the second major piece of anti-abortion legislation filed in Florida ahead of the state’s 2026 legislative session, which begins a little more than two weeks from today.

Republicans in the House and Senate are already advancing separate legislation — Senate Bill 164 and House Bill 289 — that would grant a fertilized egg some of the same legal rights as a living human child. It’s part of a conservative legal strategy ultimately aimed at enabling courts to completely ban all abortion, under any circumstances and at any stage of pregnancy.

And, of course, this is all happening just one year after 57 percent of Florida voters cast ballots in support of an amendment that would have enshrined abortion rights into the state constitution — and prohibited politicians in Tallahassee from interfering with women’s access to the procedure.

That ballot measure ultimately fell just short of the 60 percent supermajority needed to amend Florida’s constitution — in part because Gov. Ron DeSantis spent millions of dollars in taxpayer money on television commercials attacking the amendment.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.