Texas officials last week arrested a man who allegedly spiked his then-girlfriend’s coffee with abortion pills, causing her to miscarry. But they didn’t charge him with violating the state’s abortion ban or for assaulting the woman—they charged him with murder. Not only is this a horrifying instance of reproductive coercion, the specific charge is also an escalation for fetal personhood, or the dangerous legal theory that embryos and fetuses have constitutional rights.
The details of the incident are galling. The Parker County Sheriff’s Offices said in a press release that Justin Banta, 38, learned last fall that his girlfriend was pregnant; he is married to another woman. Banta reportedly told the unidentified woman that he would pay for an abortion and she said she wanted to continue the pregnancy. On October 17, the woman had an ultrasound when she was about six weeks pregnant and was reportedly told that the pregnancy looked healthy. Later that day, she met Banta at a coffee shop and relayed this information to him. It’s at this time, the woman told police, that she believes he put abortion-inducing drugs in her drink without her knowledge. The next day, she started bleeding heavily and went to the emergency room and lost the pregnancy on October 19.
After the woman contacted police, the sheriff’s office interviewed Banta and took his phone as evidence. They allege that Banta, who works in the IT department of the U.S. Department of Justice, remotely erased the contents of his phone after he turned it in. According affidavits obtained by the Dallas Morning News, security camera footage shows Banta purchasing two drinks before the woman arrived and stirring a white substance into the cup he gave the woman. He also brought a plate of homemade cookies, which the woman did not eat. The woman gave the cookies to local authorities, which sent them to an FBI lab for analysis. The FBI said they contained mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs in the FDA-approved medication abortion regimen.
On June 6, the Texas Rangers charged Banta with capital murder and the Parker County Sheriff’s Office charged him with tampering with physical evidence. Records from the Parker County Jail only show those two charges—meaning that no charges have been filed for the violence Banta inflicted on the woman.
We know Texas officials are capable of filing such charges because they’ve done it before in a similar case. When another man, Mason Herring, tried to end his wife’s pregnancy with pills in 2022, he was charged with felony assault to induce abortion and assault of a pregnant person. Herring’s multiple attempts were not successful, though the child was born 10 weeks premature and has developmental delays. He plead guilty to assault of a pregnant person and injury to a child and was sentenced to 180 days in jail and 10 years’ probation.
But here, law enforcement chose to charge Banta with murder—specifically capital murder, which is the highest degree of homicide in the state, usually reserved for instances including the murder of a firefighter, a child younger than 15, or multiple people. People convicted of the charge can be sentenced to life in prison without parole, or even the death penalty.
No one should end another person’s pregnancy against their will. But a murder charge suggests that embryos and fetuses are people, which they very much are not.
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