USA – Shield Laws Are the Fault Line in the Battle Over Abortion Access

New York’s shield law was designed to protect providers mailing medication abortion pills out of state. But a New York provider is facing legal action in Louisiana and Texas.

Rachel Rebouché
February 20, 2025

Can a doctor who lives in and practices medicine in the state of New York be fined by a Texas court for violating Texas’s abortion ban and licensure law, or be indicted on criminal charges under Louisiana’s abortion law for prescribing and mailing abortion pills to patients who are residents of those states?

Dr. Margaret Carpenter is facing a lawsuit from the state of Texas and an indictment from a Louisiana grand jury for prescribing and shipping medication abortion to people in those states. Last Thursday, Louisiana’s governor signed an order to extradite, demanding that New York force Carpenter to travel to Louisiana to stand trial. New York Governor Kathy Hochul forcefully rejected the demand, stating: “I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana — not now, not ever.” Around the same time, a Texas state court entered a default judgement against Carpenter, finding her in violation of Texas’s abortion ban and liable for over $100,000 in fines and attorney fees.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/shield-laws-fault-line-abortion-access/

20.02.2025

Commentary

abortion pills

abortion trafficking laws

Dr. Margaret Carpenter

Kathy Hochul

mifepristone and misoprostol

USA – Why speech could be a target for the anti-abortion movement in 2025

The anti-abortion movement is looking at ways to control information about how and where to obtain abortions

Carter Sherman
Fri 27 Dec 2024

The next front in the US abortion wars may be what people are allowed to say about it.

More than two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, US abortions are on the rise, thanks in large part to the spread of abortion pills and travel across state lines. This has infuriated anti-abortion advocates, who have proposed policies to help the incoming Trump administration curtail the mailing of abortion pills and targeted individuals and groups that help women get out-of-state abortions. In a sign of how the issue is pitting states against one another, Texas earlier this month sued a New York-based doctor who allegedly provided a telehealth abortion to a Texan woman.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/27/speech-anti-abortion-movement

USA – Abortion Ballot Measures Aren’t Safe From the Courts

People are understandably excited about statewide votes on abortion, but they could be gutted by a future Trump administration or by conservative judges.

By Susan Rinkunas
June 6, 2024

There could be nearly a dozen constitutional amendments codifying the right to abortion on the ballot this fall—and some could even overturn active abortion bans, like in Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota.

But abortion ballot measures are not a magic fix: They don’t immediately undo bad laws, as evidenced by Ohio advocates having to file multiple lawsuits to challenge past restrictions, and they can’t bring back clinics that closed. And there’s one more vulnerability we’re not talking about: Pro-choice ballot measures aren’t safe from a future Trump administration, or the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/abortion-ballot-measures-arent-safe-from-the-courts

Abortion Shield Laws: A New War Between the States

Doctors in six states where abortion is legal are using new laws to send abortion pills to tens of thousands of women in states where it is illegal.

By Pam Belluck
Feb. 22, 2024

Behind an unmarked door in a boxy brick building outside Boston, a quiet rebellion is taking place. Here, in a 7-by-12-foot room, abortion is being made available to thousands of women in states where it is illegal.

The patients do not have to travel here to terminate their pregnancies, and they do not have to wait weeks to receive abortion medication from overseas.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/health/abortion-shield-laws-telemedicine.html

USA opinion: It’s too dangerous to allow this antiquated law to exist any longer

by David S. Cohen, Greer Donley and Rachel ReboucheComst
Mon January 22, 2024

The most significant national threat to reproductive rights is not a looming Supreme Court judgment or a bill being considered by Congress. It’s already here, in the form of an extant but long dormant law from 1873 that could ban abortion nationwide: the Comstock Act. The act is named after Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader from the late 1800s who used his power as a special agent of the US Postal Service to enforce his beliefs about sex and propriety. He was able to persuade Congress to pass laws against “indecent or immoral” materials, including broad definitions of contraception, pornography and abortion.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/abortion-threat-comstock-act-must-be-repealed-cohen-donley-rebouche/index.html

22.01.2024

USA – Pharmacies begin dispensing abortion pills

A handful of pharmacies are offering the pills 10 months after the Biden administration allowed them to do so.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and LAUREN GARDNER
Oct 6, 2023

A handful of independent pharmacies across the country have quietly begun dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone under new rules created by the Biden administration earlier this year, even as a looming Supreme Court case could reimpose restrictions or ban the drugs entirely.

Thousands of branches of major pharmacy chains are poised to join them — making the drugs more accessible to millions of people nationwide and kicking off a new phase of the legal and political battle over the most popular method of ending a pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/pharmacies-begin-dispensing-abortion-pills-00120397

What to Know About the Latest Court Ruling on the Abortion Pill

The upshot: Don’t panic.

MADISON PAULY, Mother Jones
Aug 16, 2023

Earlier this spring, the Supreme Court hit pause on a controversial ruling in a massive anti-abortion lawsuit with the potential to eliminate nationwide access to the most common method of abortion. The case, brought by anti-abortion organizations and doctors, challenged the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, a pill used in medication abortion.

In April, a far-right federal district court judge in Texas had sided with the anti-abortion doctors, issuing an unprecedented order to suspend mifepristone’s approval. But before his decision could take effect, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to step in and pause the order while it went through appeals. The Court agreed.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/08/abortion-pill-mifepristone-texas-supreme-court-ruling/

USA – Group using ‘shield laws’ to provide abortion care in states that ban it

Aid Access ships medication abortion to all 50 states under the protection provided to clinicians serving patients in banned states

Rebecca Grant
Sun 23 Jul 2023

Dr Linda Prine is providing abortion access to people in all 50 states, even those that have banned it. That might seem like an admission to be discreet about in post-Roe America, but Prine and her colleagues at Aid Access, a telemedicine abortion service, are doing it openly and in a way they believe is on firm legal ground.

On 14 July, Aid Access announced that over the past month, a team of seven doctors, midwives and nurse practitioners have mailed medication abortion to 3,500 people under the protection of “shield laws”, which protect clinicians who serve patients in states where providing abortion is illegal. As soon as she learned about shield laws, Prine knew it represented an opportunity to go on the offensive, for those bold enough to try it.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/23/shield-laws-provide-abortion-care-aid-access

In the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled states should decide the legality of abortion, voters at the state level have been doing just that: 4 essential reads

June 12, 2023
Lorna Grisby, Senior Politics & Society Editor

When the Supreme Court ruled on June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that states – some of which have been chipping away at women’s access to abortion for years – should decide the legality of abortion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s majority opinion that “women are not without electoral or political power.”

In one fell swoop, the court’s 6-3 ruling that abortion is not a federal constitutional right overturned Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey – two decisions that provided federal protections for abortion.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/in-the-year-since-the-supreme-court-overturned-roe-v-wade-and-ruled-states-should-decide-the-legality-of-abortion-voters-at-the-state-level-have-been-doing-just-that-4-essential-reads-207299

USA – Small, rural communities are becoming abortion access battlegrounds

After local leaders in rural Nevada reached an impasse over a proposed Planned Parenthood clinic, an anti-abortion activist pitching local abortion bans arrived at their remote city hall.

May 21, 2023
By Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez | KFF Health News

WEST WENDOVER, Nev. — In April, Mark Lee Dickson arrived in this 4,500-person city that hugs the Utah-Nevada border to pitch an ordinance banning abortion.

Dickson is the director of the anti-abortion group Right to Life of East Texas and founder of another organization that has spent the last few years traveling the United States trying to convince local governments to pass abortion bans.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/small-rural-communities-are-becoming-abortion-access-battlegrounds-rcna84921