(LifeSiteNews) — Texas has launched another lawsuit in the ongoing interstate abortion wars being waged between pro-abortion blue states and pro-life red states. Texas has sued Delaware nurse practitioner Debra Lynch, accusing her of mailing dangerous abortion pills in defiance of the state’s pro-life laws.
Lynch runs an ironically named group called “Her Safe Harbor,” which ships abortion pills by mail into states with pro-life laws. On its website, the group boasts that it provides abortion pills to women in all 50 states, and shipping the drugs takes only four to six days. It advertises “Abortion with medicines until 10 weeks after your last period,” although there is no way for the group to determine how far along in pregnancy the pill recipients are.
Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, a vast network of well-funded abortion organizations has sprung up, committed to sending abortion pills into pro-life states in contravention of abortion bans.
This network is largely responsible for the rise in America’s abortion rate and is enabled by a Biden administration policy, enacted under the pretext of Covid, that removed the requirement for an in-person doctor’s appointment to obtain abortion pills. With the Trump administration thus far declining to reinstate that requirement, abortion pills are pouring across state lines.
To protect interstate pill traffickers, Democrats in Delaware and other states have passed so-called “shield laws,” which protect abortionists from being prosecuted in other states and serve as legal cover for groups like Her Safe Harbor shipping abortion pills in contravention of state pro-life laws. New York, California, and six other states permit abortionists to use “telemedicine” to prescribe abortion pills in states where it is banned; Delaware’s law is less clear.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Her Safe Harbor and several other abortion groups in August; at the time, Lynch declared that she would not stop mailing abortion pills into Texas and further noted that immediately after the receipt of the letter, she had received over 150 pill requests from the state.
“None of our providers are primarily concerned with our own wellbeing or our own legal status,” Lynch told the Guardian at the time. “All the horrors that women are facing because of these ridiculous bans and restrictions outweigh anything that could possibly happen to us as providers, in terms of a fine or a lawsuit or even jail time, if it were to come to that.”
Paxton intends to test that resolve. He is accusing Lynch of violating Texas law by prescribing and shipping abortion drugs into the state; practicing medicine without a Texas license; conducting telehealth consultations with Texas residents; and participating in a “network of out-of-state abortion traffickers” that “deliberately target Texas residents.” In his filing, he is requesting the Texas state court grant an immediate court order to prohibit Lynch and Her Safe Harbor from prescribing and shipping the abortion pill as well as conducting “telehealth consultations” with Texas residents.
Lynch is not the only player in this interstate abortion battle. Texas has previously sued Margaret Carpenter, a New York abortionist, for mailing abortion pills into the state; Louisiana has sued both Carpenter and California abortionist Remy Coeytaux. The pills Carpenter mailed into Louisiana resulted in a teenage girl being coerced into aborting a wanted child and subsequently taken to the hospital after suffering a medical emergency. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ignored this and declared that she would defend Carpenter to the utmost of her power.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has again angered pro-life groups by asking a federal court to pause a Louisiana lawsuit that seeks to end the practice of mailing abortion pills across state lines. The Trump administration argued that the case may be moot after the long-awaited release of their ongoing safety review of mifepristone.
