How travel bans, shield laws, and duelling state courts are rewriting the rules of American federalism
Author: Kshama Shukla, City Academy Law College, Lucknow
To the Point
Four years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation sent abortion law back to the states, the country hasn’t settled into fifty separate, self-contained legal systems. Instead, states have started reaching across their own borders to police what happens in other states and the result is a legal collision that nobody fully planned for. Restrictive states are trying to punish out-of-state doctors who mail abortion pills to their residents. Protective states have passed “shield laws” refusing to cooperate with those efforts. Neither side is backing down and the fight is now sitting in courtrooms from Texas to New York, with the Supreme Court almost certainly waiting at the end of the road.
Use of Legal Jargon
A quick vocabulary check, because this area of law leans on a few recurring terms:
●Shield laws: State statutes that block cooperation with out-of-state subpoenas, extradition requests, and civil judgments connected to abortion care that was legal where it was provided.
●Full Faith and Credit Clause: The constitutional provision (Article IV, Section 1) requiring states to honor each other’s judicial judgments the clause now being tested by states refusing to enforce abortion-related rulings.
●Telehealth medication abortion: Abortion induced by mifepristone and misoprostol, prescribed via video or phone consultation and shipped by mail, often across state lines.
●Extraterritorial application: When one state’s law attempts to reach conduct that occurred, in whole or part, inside another state’s borders.
●Comity: The general legal principle that courts in one jurisdiction will respect and enforce the laws and judicial decisions of another, absent a strong public policy reason not to.
The Proof
Before 2022, this entire conversation would have been unnecessary. Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey guaranteed a baseline right to abortion nationwide, so a patient’s home state and a provider’s home state were operating under the same constitutional floor. Dobbs removed that floor. Overnight, abortion became a matter of pure state policy, and states split hard in opposite directions.
Roughly a dozen states enacted near-total bans. In response, states such as New York, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Colorado, and Connecticut passed shield laws designed to protect providers, and sometimes patients and helpers, from being dragged into another state’s courts, prisons, or licensing boards for conduct that is fully legal where it took place.
This is not an abstract dispute anymore. As of mid-2026, providers operating under shield-law protection are collectively supporting nearly 15,000 abortions a month for patients living in states with total or six-week bans, largely through mailed medication abortion.
The flashpoint case involves Dr Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician who prescribed abortion medication by telehealth to a patient in Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued her, won a default judgment in a Texas court exceeding $100,000, and then asked New York courts to enforce it. A New York court refused, invoking the state’s shield law. Louisiana separately indicted Dr Carpenter and sought her extradition; New York’s governor declined to comply, again citing shield-law protections.
Texas escalated further. In December 2025, it enacted HB 7, the first law in the country explicitly written to target shield-law protections by allowing private citizens to sue anyone who mails, or intends to mail, abortion pills into the state. Around the same time, Texas filed a fresh lawsuit, Texas v. Bruck, directly challenging the enforceability of New York’s shield law in New York’s own courts, in Ulster County. In January 2026, Paxton filed a second telehealth-provider suit, this time against a Delaware nurse practitioner, testing whether Delaware’s slightly different shield-law structure holds up any better than New York’s.
Separately, Louisiana has taken the fight to federal regulators, suing the FDA over its 2021 decision to end the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, the change that made mail-order medication abortion practical in the first place. A Fifth Circuit panel found that this FDA policy was enabling close to 1,000 abortions a month in Louisiana alone, and briefly blocked mailing of mifepristone nationwide before that order was narrowed.
Abstract
This article examines the escalating conflict between abortion-restrictive and abortion-protective states in the years following Dobbs, focusing on two mechanisms: state travel-related enforcement efforts and shield laws that block interstate cooperation. It traces the doctrinal tension between the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which generally compels states to honour each other’s judgments, and states’ historic sovereign right to decline enforcement of judgments that violate their own public policy. Drawing on ongoing litigation Texas v. Bruck, the Paxton prosecutions of out-of-state telehealth providers, and Louisiana’s FDA challenge the article argues that these disputes represent an unresolved structural question about American federalism that the Supreme Court will eventually be forced to answer, likely within the next several years.
Case Laws
●Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, 597 U.S. 215 (2022) Overturned Roe and Casey, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returning the issue to the states.
●Texas v. Carpenter (Texas default judgment, 2024-2025) Texas obtained a default judgment against a New York physician for prescribing abortion medication by telehealth to a Texas resident; New York courts subsequently refused to enforce the judgment under the state’s shield law.
●Texas v. Bruck (N.Y. Sup. Ct., Ulster County, filed 2025): Texas’s direct challenge to the enforceability of New York’s shield law within New York courts, widely viewed as the test case most likely to define the limits of shield-law protection.
●Paxton v. Lynch (filed Jan. 2026): Texas’s suit against a Delaware nurse practitioner operating a telehealth abortion-medication service, testing whether Delaware’s shield law, which differs structurally from New York’s, offers the same protection.
●FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 602 U.S. 367 (2024). The Supreme Court held the original physician plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge FDA’s mifepristone regulations, but left the door open for states to sue directly, which Missouri, Kansas, Idaho, and Louisiana have since pursued.
Conclusion
The country is now running two incompatible legal experiments at the same time, and the Border between them is not a line on a map so much as a rolling series of lawsuits. Shield laws were built on a reasonable premise: if abortion is legal where it happens, a state shouldn’t be able to reach across its border and punish the person who provided it. Restrictive states counter with an equally reasonable premise: if a resident within their borders received an abortion, the state where that resident lives has an interest in enforcing its own law, regardless of where the provider happened to be sitting.
Both premises can’t fully coexist, and the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause was not written with this scenario in mind. Cases like Texas v. Bruck and the Paxton prosecutions are the vehicles through which courts will have to decide, state by state and then likely nationally, how much deference one state owes another when their laws point in opposite directions. Whatever the outcome, patients and providers are living with genuine legal uncertainty right now; the rules can differ depending on which state a phone call is placed from, and that uncertainty is unlikely to resolve until the Supreme Court takes up the question directly.
FAQ
1. Can a state actually prosecute a doctor who lives in a different state?
It can try. Texas and Louisiana have both filed suits oncriminal charges against out-of-state providers. Whether those efforts succeed depends entirely on whether the provider’s home state cooperates and shield-law states have so far refused to.
2. What exactly does a shield law protect against?
Typically, three things: extradition requests, enforcement of civil judgments from other states, and cooperation with out-of-state subpoenas or investigations connected to reproductive health care that was legal in the shielding state.
3. Is mailing abortion pills across state lines a federal crime?
Not currently, though some restrictive states argue federal mailing statutes should be read to prohibit it. That argument has not succeeded in court so far, and enforcement efforts have instead focused on state-level civil and criminal claims against providers.
4. Will the Supreme Court eventually decide this?
Most legal observers think so. The structural tension between shield laws and the Full Faith and Credit Clause is exactly the kind of unresolved constitutional question the Court tends to take up once enough lower courts have weighed in, and Texas v. Bruck is widely seen as a leading candidate to get there.
