A legal clash between the states over abortion is escalating with Governor Hochul’s defiance of an extradition request — “Not now, not ever,” she thundered — from Louisiana. A Pelican State grand jury in January indicted a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a West Baton Rouge Parish resident. “The pill may be legal in New York. It’s not legal in Louisiana,” the district attorney avers. It’s shaping up as a case that could go to the Supreme Court.

The dispute shines a spotlight on the so-called “Shield Laws” on the books in 18 states and the Columbia District. These measures, enacted after the Nine reversed Roe v. Wade, grant physicians in their states legal immunity if they break laws in other states that limit abortion. Eight states go further, with laws that let medical practitioners in their states to prescribe, via telemedicine, abortion medicines and send them to other states, the Times says.

“Shield” laws also ensure that the states “will not cooperate with another state’s efforts to investigate or penalize such providers,” the Times reports. Hence Ms. Hochul’s refusal. Louisiana’s law “has no bearing on the laws here in the state of New York,” she insists. The Louisiana prosecutor muses, “I just don’t know under what theory could a doctor be thinking that you should ship your pills to Louisiana to abort our citizens’ babies.” 

The stakes are high, with some 170,000 women in 2023 traveling out of their state for abortions, the Times reports, and tens of thousands of women receiving in one state abortion pills from another state. Access to the abortion pills — via telemedicine — can be decisive for “low-income patients and others who cannot travel,” the Times reports. In 2023, some 63 percent of abortions were performed via medications, per the Guttmacher Institute.

It’s no wonder, then, that states that limit abortion want to clamp down on the interstate prescriptions. Texas, too, has its eye on the New York doctor indicted by Louisiana, Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz. The Lone Star attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed a civil suit against Dr. Carpenter over the same issue. A judge at Collin County, outside Dallas, forbade the doctor from prescribing abortion pills to Texans — and fined her $100,000. 

What’s next? Louisiana could foreseeably take to the federal courts to compel Dr. Carpenter’s extradition. Legal scholar Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis, casts doubt on the prospects of that effort succeeding, though. Legal precedent, she told the Times, suggested that extradition is not mandatory in cases where a defendant neither was present in a state where the crime was believed to be committed, nor fled from that state.

Such precedent echoes the language in Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution, which states that anyone “charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.” That said, the parchment was written in the days before telemedicine.

In addition, the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause could come into play. That clause mandates that “full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” The Alliance Defending Freedom’s Erik Baptist contends that “the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution” is “the governing principle in this case,” our Bradley Cortright reports.

The shield law case echoes another interstate case that divided America, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That federal law, widely despised, sought to supersede laws in Free States that barred returning escaped slaves back to servitude. The Nine, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, cited both the Constitution’s Extradition Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause and voided state laws that sheltered runaway slaves. Will shield laws meet the same fate?