In what is believed to be the first criminal case of its kind in the post–Roe v. Wade era, a New York-based telemedicine provider has been indicted in Louisiana—which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country—for supplying the abortion pill to a teenage patient in that state.
The Louisiana indictment against Dr. Margaret “Maggie” Campbell signals a major escalation in legal challenges by red states against telemedicine providers in blue states who are dispensing abortion drugs under shield laws meant to protect them from prosecution. As my Mother Jones colleagues have reported, those shield laws—which are on the books in 22 states and the District of Columbia—are a major reason why the number of abortions has continued to rise despite the overturn of Roe in June 2022.
The Louisiana case involves a pregnant minor whose mother allegedly purchased abortion medications from Campbell’s business, Nightingale Medical PC, in April 2024, The Advocate reported. In addition to Campbell, a grand jury in West Baton Rouge Parish also indicted the mother for allegedly coercing her to take the medicine to terminate the pregnancy. The felony charge against the two women carries a sentence of up to five years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines, WWNO reported.
The indictment comes as the anti-abortion movement has ramped up attacks on the abortion pill on multiple fronts—from pressuring the new Trump administration to reconsider the safety of mifepristone and use the Comstock Act to institute a federal abortion ban, to filing lawsuits challenging the FDA’s regulation of the drug, to introducing a flurry of new bills targeting medication abortion in numerous states. These include Louisiana, which last year became the first state to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs commonly used in medication abortions, as “controlled dangerous substances.” As my colleague Julianne McShane reported:
