‘They’re not going to help’: Texas attorney general sues Delaware abortion provider in first test of state’s shield law

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A Delaware telehealth abortion provider is being sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The lawsuit accuses Debra Lynch’s telehealth service, Her Safe Harbor, of violating Texas law by routinely sending abortion-inducing pills to women across state lines. Texas has banned most abortions, with medical providers risking decades in prison and at least $100,000 in fines. The drugs are illegal there and state law makes it a felony to supply them by mail or other means.

Lynch said Wednesday that she was not scared of Paxton’s legal threat.

“Every time the phone rings, every woman reaching out for help, that is our concern,” she said. “He’s already harming the women of Texas and the children of Texas so severely that anything he threatens to us just pales in comparison.”

The Her Safe Harbor online clinic also uses the name Delaware Community Care. It provides mifepristone and misoprostol drugs by mail to all 50 states, along with birth control and emergency contraceptives. Lynch has an active nursing license in Delaware and state law allows nurse practitioners to prescribe the medication.

Paxton alleges that Lynch broke Texas’ Human Life Protection Act, which bans abortion unless it’s performed by a physician and is medically necessary because the mother’s life is at risk. He also argued she is practicing medicine without a doctor’s license.

“The day of reckoning for this radical out-of-state abortion drug trafficker is here,” Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement. “No one, regardless of where they live, will be freely allowed to aid in the murder of unborn children in Texas.”

The complaint asks the court to issue two injunctions against Lynch: one prohibiting her or any collaborators from “performing, inducing, or attempting abortions” and another prohibiting her or any collaborators from “practicing medicine without a physician’s license.”

David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, said the case against Lynch is weak. It cites as its only evidence interviews Lynch gave to several media outlets last year. In those reports, she discusses sending the medication to places in Southeast Texas, including “Beaumont, Fulshear, Tomball, Houston, and El Paso.” Paxton filed the lawsuit in Jefferson County, Texas, claiming a “substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to this claim occurred” in the county.

“The fact that it’s being done this way, that it’s just based on her statements to a newspaper, that is not how lawsuits normally work,” Cohen said. “This case is really strange in the lack of evidence, and I think it’s far from what would be needed to prove civil liability and, even more, for criminal liability.”

Paxton also accused Lynch of violating Delaware law. In a New Times Times article cited in the lawsuit, Lynch said she decided not to include copies of the prescription in the packages to patients and use medical codes for a different health condition on the receipts.

Lynch told WHYY News her practice abides by all Delaware rules and laws. She said there had been an initial issue affixing the prescription labels to the packaging, which has since been resolved. The receipts all have the same medical code on them no matter the condition, she said, which does not violate state law because the transactions are either paid in cash or free of charge.

Case could test Delaware’s shield law

The lawsuit by Paxton’s office could be the first real scrutiny of Delaware’s shield law.

Cohen said the shield law, enacted in 2022 and broadened last year, protects Lynch. It safeguards Delaware providers if they are ever sued or criminally prosecuted by an out-of-state entity for providing reproductive health care.

Delaware’s law operates in similar ways to shield laws in other states, but lacks specific language some states have that say providers are protected regardless of where their patients are located.

Cohen said Paxton will seek a default judgement from the Jefferson County court because Lynch is unlikely to willingly participate in the proceedings there. But he said since it has no jurisdiction over someone in Delaware, Paxton would have to get a Delaware court to order Lynch to comply with Texas law.

“What the shield law does is says our courts, our officials, are not going to help in that process,” Cohen said. “They’re not going to help.”

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a statement that the state does not honor anti-abortion interstate subpoenas and that she is prepared to make that case in court.

But Lynch said she is concerned about being protected by the state’s shield law because it has yet to be tested.

“None of us do, and we went into this knowing that,” she said. “But I don’t think that anyone in any state can say that they feel confident that the shield laws in their state, whether it be New York or California or wherever or Colorado, because none of them have been tested in a court of law.”

“While shield laws may be on the books in multiple states, there is no way to feel confident, because there is no court that has validated interpretation of those shield laws,” she said.

Paxton went to New York in 2025, which also has a shield law, to try to enforce a Texas civil order against a New York telemedicine abortion provider, but the judge dismissed the case after the acting county clerk declined to file the judgment. The constitutionality of its shield law was not an issue in that case.