Helping a pregnant minor travel to get a legal abortion without parental consent is now a crime in two Republican-led states, prompting legal action by abortion-rights advocates and copycat legislation from conservative lawmakers in a few other states, Stateline reports. Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which it defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting” a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission. In May, Tennessee enacted a similar law. Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma introduced abortion trafficking bills during their most recent legislative sessions. Those five states are among the 14 that enacted strict abortion bans after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision,
Abortion-rights advocates have filed lawsuits in Alabama, Idaho, and Tennessee, arguing the laws are vague and violate constitutional rights to free speech and travel between states. A federal judge has temporarily blocked Idaho’s law from being enforced. Proponents of the laws argue they’re needed to protect parental rights and to prevent other adults from persuading adolescents to get abortions. Critics warn that abortion trafficking laws could have grave implications not only for interstate travel, but also for personal speech and communication between friends, or between children and adults they trust. Opponents also question whether states should be permitted to interfere in the business of other states. Criminalizing travel within an abortion-ban state to reach another state for legal abortion would “allow prosecutors to project power across state lines,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law. “We haven’t seen states try to interfere in what’s happening in other states in quite the same way in a long time,” she said. “That’s why there is legal uncertainty — because we’re not talking about something where we have a lot of legal precedent.”
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