Shield laws, telehealth providers and international networks mean Texas’ new bounty-style restrictions are unlikely to stop abortion pills from reaching patients.
Texas, California and New York have recently passed laws to stop or facilitate the mailing of abortion pills across state lines, which has become a critical avenue of abortion accesssince the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and 18 states banned abortion.
Despite these bans, abortion has increased over 20 percent over the last four years—from 930,000 in 2020 to 1.14 million in 2024. Telehealth abortion has been a major reason why. Eight states have passed provider shield laws that allow doctors to serve patients in other states by telehealth. Providers in these states are now serving over 13,000 people in states with bans each month.
In response, prosecutors in Texas and Louisiana have brought a civil complaint and criminal charges against a New York doctor who prescribed abortion pills by telehealth to people in these states. New York refused to extradite the doctor to Louisiana and she did not respond to the Texas lawsuit.
After the Texas court entered a default judgement against her for $100,000, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tried to file a lawsuit in New York to collect the money from the doctor. Following New York’s shield law, a New York court clerk refused to allow Paxton to file the lawsuit.
Paxton has now filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the New York provider shield law, arguing that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution should force New York to carry out the Texas judgment. New York Attorney General Leticia James recently intervened in the lawsuit to defend the New York law.
Paxton was able to sue the New York doctor because the prescription bottle she sent to her patient in Texas listed the doctor’s name. In February, New York strengthened their shield law by allowing clinicians to omit their names from mifepristone prescription labels.
Then in July, a private citizen in Texas sued a California doctor for prescribing abortion pills to his estranged girlfriend. In response, the California legislature passed a law last Thursday allowing removal of the names of the patients, providers and pharmacies from mifepristone prescriptions. This law is particularly important because the pharmacy that mails many of these medications to restrictive states is located in California.
In an attempt to further intimidate shield providers from serving patients in Texas, Republican lawmakers just passed a new law that allows any private citizen to sue doctors, pharmacies or any other people or organizations that prescribe, ship or act with intention to help a person obtain abortion pills in Texas. The law allows for up to a $100,000 award. This law expands a 2021 law, known as SB 8 “bounty hunter” law, that allowed people to sue others for $10,000 if they “aid and abet” another person to obtain an abortion. The recent law exempts rapists from filing these lawsuits, but allows rapists’ family members to do so.
This new law is unlikely to succeed at blocking abortion pills from the state, said Elisa Wells, co-founder and access director at Plan C, which researches and shares information about how people are accessing abortion pills in the United States: “This unjust attempt to restrict access to care will just make providers more bold moving forward. These providers are determined to help people who need access to safe and effective pills by mail in the privacy of their own home to have the abortions that are being denied to them by the politicians in Texas.”
The more crazy stuff that the Texas legislature does around this to try and block access, the more visible the option of pills by mail becomes.
Elisa Wells
When they passed their first bounty hunter law in 2021, Texas successfully intimated abortion providers in the state from serving clients, but these were brick and mortar clinics operating inside Texas. Shield state providers sending pills into Texas are not located in the state and most do not have brick and mortar locations—they are entirely virtual. Furthermore, these providers are mission-driven people who understand the risks they are taking and believe that helping women access this necessary medical care is worth the risk.
Shield state providers are also working closely with lawyers and policy makers to strengthen and enforce their telehealth provider shield laws to make their operations as secure as possible.
“It’s possible that some of the providers may step back, but access is still going to be possible by mail in Texas, regardless of this attempt to instill fear in people,” said Wells, noting that there are alternative pathways to obtain pills.
In addition to U.S.-based providers mailing abortion pills to patients in Texas, there are three international telehealth providers also serving Texas patients as well as community networks sharing these medications for free and websites selling abortion pills. Plan C lists vetted organizations doing this work on their website at plancpills.org.
“It’s going to be really hard to stop access to abortion pills, given the size of the global marketplace for these medications and the giant infrastructure of things moving in and out of the United States,” said Wells. “Antiabortion folks are getting more and more desperate in their attempts to stop access because our efforts to share information about how people are accessing pills have been so successful.”
In fact, the antiabortion movement’s furious attempts to restrict abortion pills, including by reviving a Texas lawsuit dismissed by the Supreme Court in June 2024, may have unintended consequences.
“The more crazy stuff that the Texas legislature does around this to try and block access, the more visible the option of pills by mail becomes,” said Wells. “They are basically publicizing that access is possible by passing this kind of draconian legislation. In the process of trying to stop it, they’re letting people know, you can get pills by mail in Texas.”
Great Job Carrie N. Baker & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
