Pro-abortion activists have flooded Texas with mail-order abortion pills for years, betting the state would never actually enforce its own law.
A Stephenville orthopedic surgeon just found out how wrong that bet was.
One prescription from December 2023 gave the Texas Medical Board no legal choice but to end his 27 year career.
Stephenville Doctor's Abortion Pill Prescription Triggers Mandatory License Revocation
Dr. William Rockwell Evans built Cross Timbers Orthopaedics into a fixture of Erath County medicine.
He treated Tarleton State University athletes.
He treated Ranger College athletes.
He spent time as a physician for the Atlanta Ballet and the Atlanta Olympics before he ever set foot in Stephenville.
None of that mattered this week.
The Texas Medical Board notified Evans on Thursday that his license was gone, effective immediately.
Cross Timbers Orthopaedics closed its doors the same day.
The board's own summary says Evans prescribed a patient an abortive medication back in December 2023 – a direct violation of the state's abortion ban.
Texas Medical Board Has No Discretion Under the Human Life Protection Act
Here is the part the sympathetic profiles of Evans keep glossing over.
Under Texas Occupations Code Section 164.055, the medical board does not get to weigh 27 years of service against one illegal prescription.
The statute is written so the board has no discretion at all once a violation is established.
Texas' Human Life Protection Act, in effect since August 2022, classifies an illegal abortion as a first degree felony.
That felony carries up to 99 years in prison.
It carries civil penalties starting at $100,000 per violation, the same number Attorney General Ken Paxton sought earlier this year against a Houston area abortion pill provider.
Evans is not the first Texas physician to learn the state means it.
Back in February 2014, the state shut down a Houston clinic and suspended Dr. Theodore Herring's license the moment he ignored an abortion safety law, the first enforcement action of its kind in Texas.
More than a decade later, the message has not changed – comply with the law or lose your practice, no matter how many championships you helped an athlete win.
Stephenville's Pregnancy Resource Center Already Had a Better Answer
Local coverage of Evans skipped right past the alternative already sitting a few miles from his office.
Stephenville is home to Choices Clinic & Life Resource Center, which offers free pregnancy testing, free ultrasounds, and ongoing support to mothers facing an unplanned pregnancy.
No prescription pad required, and no felony risk either.
That is what protecting a mother and her baby is supposed to look like in Erath County.
A frightened patient did not need an abortive medication in December 2023.
She needed exactly the kind of help already available down the road from Cross Timbers Orthopaedics.
The Board's Own Files Show More Than One Red Flag
Board records separately describe what they call an inappropriate sexual relationship between Evans and a patient.
They also flag a 2020 case in which Evans is accused of operating on the wrong knee and concealing the mistake afterward.
Reporters covering this story cannot say for certain how those episodes weighed into this week's revocation.
What the law makes certain is that the abortion violation alone was enough on its own.
Mail Order Abortion Pills Are Already a Bigger Texas Fight
Evans did not stumble into an isolated mistake.
His case sits inside a much larger showdown over pills that cross state lines by mail.
Pro-abortion telehealth providers have leaned on loosened federal rules dating back to the Biden administration to keep shipping the pills into red states anyway.
Texas Right to Life and other pro-life organizations have already asked the Trump administration to shut down that pipeline, warning that so-called shield laws let out-of-state providers dodge the very law that just cost Evans his license.
That is exactly why the Evans case matters beyond Erath County.
Every doctor watching this outcome now knows Texas will follow through, mail-order pill or prescription pad, decades of service or none at all.
Analysis: The Law Worked Exactly the Way It Was Written To
Somewhere in Austin, the people who wrote the Human Life Protection Act are reading about a semi-retired sports doctor watching his life's work close in one day, and they are not apologizing for it.
That is the point of a law with no exceptions – it does not bend for résumés, championships, or 27 years of goodwill in Erath County.
Stephenville will feel the loss of an orthopedic surgeon in a region that already has too few of them, and that is a real cost pro-life Texans should not wave away.
But the alternative – a medical board that looks the other way because a doctor is well liked – is how states end up with abortion bans that exist only on paper.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins tracked Texas' 2021 abortion law and found nearly 9,800 more babies were born in the state over nine months than would have been expected without it.
Every one of those children is the actual point of a law like this, not a side effect of it.
Every physician in Texas just got a very expensive reminder of which law actually has teeth, and every mother in the county just got a reminder that a better option was already open down the road.
Sources:
- Sofia Vasquez, "Stephenville Surgeon Loses License After 27 Years Over Abortion Pill Case," Hoodline, September 5, 2026.
- Staff, "Texas Doctor's License Revoked After He Allegedly Prescribed Patient an 'Abortive'," Dallas Morning News, September 2026.
- Staff, "Texas Abortion Clinic Shut Down, Doctor's License Suspended," Fox News, February 16, 2014.
- Staff, "Texas Trigger Ban on Abortion Goes Into Effect," Courthouse News Service, 2022.
- Texas Right to Life, "Texas Right to Life Joins Pro-Life Groups Calling for Trump Admin to Stop Mail-Order Abortion Pills," 2026.
- Texas Occupations Code Section 164.055, Texas Public Law.
- Eleanor Klibanoff, "Nearly 10,000 More Babies Born Due to Texas' Restrictive Abortion Law," The Texas Tribune, June 30, 2023.
- Choices Clinic & Life Resource Center, choicesclinic.net.
