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A looming constitutional battle between Texas and New York is the leading edge of the escalating states’ rights fight over the prescribing and mailing of abortion pills to patients in states with bans.
Sept. 8, 2025, 10:00 a.m. ET
America’s battle over abortion has entered an intense phase of legal maneuvering over a deeply fraught issue of states’ rights: Whether states must honor one another’s abortion laws.
At the center of the fight are abortion shield laws, which were adopted by many states that support abortion rights after the Supreme Court revoked the nationwide right to abortion three years ago. Shield laws in at least eight states protect health care providers who prescribe abortion pills by telemedicine and send them to patients in states with abortion bans.
Officials in those shield-law states are prevented from obeying subpoenas, extradition requests and other legal actions that states with bans take against abortion providers. That is a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in legal matters.
With more and more patients — well over 100,000 per year — receiving pills from shield-law providers, states with abortion bans have been searching for ways to block or hinder those laws. Now, the battle is about to explode into a constitutional showdown in a New York court — a challenge that is expected to wind up in the Supreme Court.
On Monday, the attorney general of New York, Letitia James, announced that she was stepping into a case filed in New York by the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton. The case stems from a lawsuit Mr. Paxton filed in December against a New York doctor, whom he accused of prescribing abortion pills to a patient in Texas.
In court documents, Mr. Paxton argues that New York’s abortion shield law amounts to a “policy of hostility to the public acts/statutes of a sister state” and that it violates the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which says that states should generally respect other states’ laws.
