Louisiana’s attorney general is preparing to sue California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in federal court in an effort to force those states to extradite doctors who face criminal charges for mailing pills to Louisiana for abortions.
It’s the only way to “address them protecting people who are openly committed to nullifying and violating our criminal laws in our state,” Attorney General Liz Murill said in an interview Wednesday.
Louisiana has sent formal requests to California and New York to extradite doctors in two separate criminal cases, both of which involve state felony charges for causing an abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.
Newsom and Hochul have each refused to turn the doctors over to Louisiana for criminal prosecution. They cite their state’s abortion shield laws, which protect doctors and patients from prosecution initiated in states that outlaw abortion.
“As a champion of reproductive freedoms, California will not hesitate to assert its lawful authority to defend the fundamental rights that define us as a state,” Newsom spokesperson Marissa Saldivar said in a statement Wednesday.
Hochul’s office did not return requests for comment.
California doctor Remy Coeytaux was charged in January for mailing abortion pills to a woman in St. Tammany Parish who took them and terminated her pregnancy, Murrill’s office says.
New York Doctor Margaret Carpenter was charged last year for mailing abortion medication to West Baton Rouge Parish, where it was taken by a teenage girl and ended her pregnancy, prosecutors say.
Abortion conflicts
Legal scholars expect that the conflict between states over abortion regulation will inevitably end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Louisiana largely criminalizes abortion and has placed tight restrictions on the two medications that are commonly used together to terminate a pregnancy.
California and New York, in contrast, broadly allow abortion until fetal viability. They’ve also passed state-level shield laws designed to prevent anti-abortion states from pursuing legal action against their residents over reproductive healthcare.
“They don’t agree with the laws of our state, and so they have this whole system set up to nullify our laws,” Murrill said. “I think that is an affront to the full faith and credit that our state is afforded under the United States Constitution.”
The Constitution’s “full faith and credit clause” requires courts in one state to respect the laws and judgments of courts from other states, though there are exceptions.
Murrill said mailing abortion pills to Louisiana is like sending someone a gun who isn’t allowed to have one under state law or deadly drugs like fentanyl that end up killing a child.
“This conduct is unethical — medically unethical — in addition to being illegal,” she said.
Murrill said the legal question that will be at play in the federal lawsuits deals with the Constitution’s extradition clause, which requires states to respect extradition requests from other states for fugitives who commit crimes and “flee from justice.”
Murrill said she believes some Supreme Court precedent on the issue is ambiguous when applied in the context of the 21st Century. “But that’s what they’re relying on to say they can both nullify our laws and then protect people from having to answer for their illegal conduct in our state,” she said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Attorney General Liz Murrill’s comments on Supreme Court precedent at issue in these cases.