What Are Abortion Shield Laws? Abortion shield laws are in the spotlight as New York protects a doctor from charges in Louisiana and Texas. Dean Rebouché, who helped draft the first such bill in 2022, tells Time Magazine the cases “point to what we can expect moving forward for intense interstate conflict … given that Dobbs returned abortion to the states and a third of the country prohibits abortion from the earliest moments of pregnancy or before six weeks, just as many states have codified abortion rights in their constitutions and their state laws.”

Shield Laws Are the Fault Line in the Battle Over Abortion Access NY governor Kathy Hochul has refused to honor extradition requests for Dr. Mary Carpenter, charged with violating abortion bans in Louisiana and Texas, citing New York’s shield law. Dean Rebouché explains how such laws depart from democratic norms and why they have become necessary.

Texas legislators have filed bills that would make abortion pills controlled substances, which would introduce recordkeeping and storage requirements that could make pharmacists reluctant to dispense the drugs. Dean Rebouche tells Politico “There’s potential for this to create a kind of fishing expedition for miscarriage management.” Read More

Anti-abortion activists are proposing legislation to curtail speech about the availability of abortion services. Dean Rachel Rebouche tells the Guardian that “controlling what people can find out about services that are not legal in their state but are legal somewhere else is part of this larger conversation post-Dobbs.” Read More

Dean Rebouche notes twin concerns over the collection of abortion data, particularly for providers in ban states where the care falls within an exception. “The tension we find ourselves in is patient privacy,” she said, “but also the looming allegation that exceptions are being misused.” Read More

Dean Rebouché, writing for The Nation on how Dobbs has created an abortion training crisis: “Now, in ban states, there is hesitation to deliver abortion care under the law. In the future, there may be no one in an ER who is trained or able to do so.” Read More

Nebraskans will soon vote on competing ballot measures that will either expand access to abortion care or keep the current 12-week limit. Dean Rebouché says the twist will force advocates on both sides to reach out to those with “abortion ambivalence.” Read More  

“Shield-law providers” – practitioners and volunteers in states that have promised to protect them from out-of-state prosecution – accounted for about 9,500 medication abortions in March 2024. Dean Rebouche says they are on “new legal terrain” because while no one has tested shield laws yet, that doesn’t mean no one will. Read More

Even as the Supreme Court preserves access to medication abortion on procedural grounds, conservative states vow to bring new claims. “That’s the world we live in [now]. We should expect this kind of conflict between an agency [and] a state … between states themselves,” says Dean Rebouche. Read More

Pro-choice ballot measures have been widely successful, but could be undone by a Trump administration or the Supreme Court. Still, Dean Rachel Rebouche tells Jezebel, their “real power … is contradicting the narrative that Americans do not support abortion rights, or that we are a deeply, entirely fractured country.” Read More