SCOTUS Asked To Stop Blue States From Shielding Abortion Drug Dealers

There are many facets to the mail-order abortion fight, but the next battle comes in the form of a filing from the attorneys general of three pro-life states who are asking the Supreme Court to restore the constitutional equality disrupted by at least three blue states’ “shield laws.”

Democrat states California, Massachusetts, and New York have all enacted abortion-for-all policies designed to prevent punishment for doctors who illegally prescribe abortion drugs to people in pro-life states where they are banned.

In their motion filed on Sept. 30, Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill of Louisiana, Tim Griffin of Arkansas, and Steve Marshall of Alabama warned that these shield laws “have nothing to do with ensuring the availability of abortion within the borders of New York, Massachusetts, and California — they exist only to perpetuate abortions outside of those borders.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration claims its hands are tied until it concludes its mifepristone review, even though no review is required for the regulatory agency to reinstate some of the common-sense abortion pill safeguards, including an in-person doctor visit, that were stripped at President Joe Biden’s behest. Congress also previously failed to act to curb mail-order mifepristone, even after Murrill and several other attorneys general asked legislators to address shield laws. As a result, the GOP legal officers want the high bench to examine their case in light of the “full faith and credit and the equal-sovereignty doctrine.”

Murrill, who is leading a separate federal lawsuit again the FDA over its mail-order mifepristone scheme, told The Federalist in February that shield laws and the governors using them to block extraditions “are essentially facilitating criminal conduct in our state and they are nullifying our laws in our state simply because they disagree with our policy.”

New York and California specifically have refused Louisiana’s efforts to extradite and hold out-of-state doctors accountable for illegally prescribing mifepristone to residents of the Pelican State.

“It is also a real attack on the entire constitutional structure that presumes that states are going to give full faith and credit to other states’ laws,” she warned.

The SCOTUS motion similarly argues that California, New York, and Massachusetts have “undermined” the high bench’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision and “claimed the right to make abortion policy — their abortion policy — for the entire Nation by overriding democratically enacted laws in pro-life states like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama.”

“This lawsuit also seeks to restore the promise of Dobbs — and to vindicate this Court’s authority to say what the law is. Dobbs is no more than a parchment promise if shield-law states can defy this Court by unilaterally decreeing that abortions must flourish in pro-life states,” the motion argues.

These states aren’t acting alone. A separate lawsuit filed in the Western District of Louisiana by the Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana attorneys general on the same day names 30 individuals and organizations who, through “a sweeping, coordinated scheme,” illegally prescribe and mail abortion drugs to pro-life states where they are banned.

“This is not accidental or incidental: They acknowledge that their conduct is illegal —
some even do business only in states where their conduct is illegal, and others send 95% of their monthly shipments to such states,” the complaint states.

With just a few clicks, anyone, including men, children, abusers, and traffickers, can order dangerous abortion pills to their doorstep — sometimes for free. According to Murrill, all three attorneys general offices were able to obtain abortion pills through various mail-order mifepristone websites. The bottle Murrill’s office possessed “did not include any information about the prescriber or information about the risks of the medication.”

According to the filing, the entities selling mifepristone “mislead consumers” by advertising it as “safer than Tylenol” even though some reports suggest the prolific abortion pills have an 11 percent serious adverse event rate.

[RELATED: Louisiana Man Faces Felonies For Poisoning Teen Daughter, 1 Pound Grandbaby With Abortion Pills]

The result of this “direct and intended … nationwide scheme,” the complaint notes, are thousands of abortions across all three states each month — approximately 1,000 in Louisiana, 300 in Arkansas, and 700 in Alabama. The filing also emphasizes that in some cases, these mail-order abortion drugs “send women to emergency rooms with severe bleeding and excruciating pain” that mifepristone traffickers encourage deceiving medical staff into believing is a miscarriage.

The doctors and abortion drug dealers the complaint claims are knowingly yet illegally participating in the violation of pro-life states’ laws don’t simply have the protection of Democrat states. They are also praised in corporate media puff pieces as heroes of the abortion “underground.”

[RELATED: Abortion Drug Makers Admit They Care About Money, Not Women]

“If state sovereignty means anything, it means that states like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama cannot be forced to endure open violations of their laws, deaths of their babies, and harms to their women and girls simply because an out-of-state actor disagrees with their sovereign prerogative to choose life within their borders,” the complaint argues.

Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.