Texas’s attorney general sued an out-of-state nurse practitioner Monday for allegedly mailing abortion pills to women in Texas, where the drugs are illegal — the latest in a string of similar lawsuits by conservative officials seeking to limit access to the pills.
Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a lawsuit against Debra Lynch, who runs Her Safe Harbor, a Delaware-based service that remotely prescribes and mails abortion pills to women across the country. Paxton’s court filing suggests that he learned about Lynch’s operations from news interviews she’d done over the last year, including with the Austin American-Statesman and the New York Times.
In those interviews, Lynch “boasted” about mailing abortion drugs to Texas, the court filing says.
“The day of reckoning for this radical out-of-state abortion drug trafficker is here,” Paxton said in a statement Tuesday. “No one, regardless of where they live, will be freely allowed to aid in the murder of unborn children in Texas.”
Lynch and Her Safe Harbor did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon.
She and her group join a growing list of out-of-state abortion providers and groups that Texas has sought to punish. All so far have worked out of states with “shield laws” enacted after the Supreme Court threw out the constitutional right to an abortion, to protect abortion providers from out-of-state prosecution.
That legal strategy has come under fire from officials in states with abortion bans, with Texas leading the way. Paxton, his allies at the Texas Capitol, and antiabortion advocates and attorneys have for months worked to thwart access to the abortion pills that are still flowing into their state.
Last year, Paxton sued a doctor in New York for sending abortion pills to Texas. This year, he sent cease-and-desist letters to a California doctor, along with Her Safe Harbor — Lynch’s group, which prescribes and mails pills — and another organization that provides information on where to access pills. Louisiana has indicted the same New York and California doctors, also accusing them of illegally sending mailing abortion pills.
New York and California have declined to cooperate with the actions by the red states.
When she spoke with the American-Statesman and the Times this year, Lynch let reporters and photographers to shadow her work, allowing them to chronicle her process of taking patient phone calls and packaging the pills alongside her husband.
Across the country, there are eight states that explicitly protect abortion providers that mail pills to patients in states with abortion bans, but that group does not include Delaware, where Her Safe Harbor began providing services in June 2024. Delaware is one of more than a dozen states that offer varying levels of protection for telehealth providers of abortion and gender transition care.
The New York Times reported in June that Lynch had decided to move to one of the eight states with the strongest shield laws. It is not clear whether she did so.
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