Suit against Debra Lynch is latest from Texas’s Republican attorney general amid ongoing attacks on abortion pills
As part of its ongoing crusade against abortion pills, Texas sued a nurse practitioner on Tuesday, accusing her of shipping pills into Texas in defiance of the state’s abortion ban.
The nurse practitioner, Debra Lynch, operates a Delaware-based group called Her Safe Harbor, which mails abortion pills to women living in states with abortion bans. Now, Texas wants a court to block Lynch from “performing, inducing or attempting abortions” in Texas, on the grounds that Texas law only permits physicians to facilitate abortions in cases of medical emergencies.
Groups like Her Safe Harbor have proliferated in the four years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, as Delaware and a handful of other blue states have enacted so-called “shield laws”. These laws typically aim to protect abortion providers from out-of-state prosecutions, lending legal cover to providers who ship pills across state lines.
But such efforts have enraged anti-abortion advocates and sparked a legal war between states that protect abortion rights and states that ban the procedure. Texas has already sued a New York-based doctor, Margaret Carpenter, over allegations that she mailed abortion pills into the state, while Louisiana has indicted both Carpenter and a California-based doctor named Remy Coeytaux. Officials in New York and California, which also have shield laws on the books, have refused to cooperate with those efforts.
