Louisiana officials seek to extradite abortion provider from California

Louisiana law enforcement officials are seeking to extradite a California doctor who, officials say, sent abortion pills to a woman living in the southern state.The extradition order for the doctor, Remy Coeytaux, marks the latest salvo in the escalating battle between states that protect abortion rights and those that ban the procedure. While Louisiana is one of more than a dozen states that have banned almost all abortions, California and a handful of other blue states have enacted so-called “shield laws”, which aim to protect abortion providers from out-of-state extradition or prosecution.“We are going to continue to fight the illegal sending of abortion pills into Louisiana,” Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, said in a video posted to X. “It’s illegal drug trafficking and we will continue to prosecute those doctors and we will also continue to pursue actions against the states that are shielding those doctors.”Coeytaux has been charged with violating a Louisiana statute that bans “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs”. If convicted, he could face fines and up to 50 years of “hard labor”. He did not immediately reply to a request for comment.The news that Louisiana wanted to arrest Coeytaux first surfaced in September, when the state filed a motion as part of Louisiana’s effort to join a federal lawsuit that seeks to limit access to the common abortion pill mifepristone. In that motion, Louisiana revealed that it had issued an arrest warrant for the doctor who supplied abortion pills to the boyfriend of a woman named Rosalie Markezich. Markezich alleged that her boyfriend obtained abortion pills by filling out an online form for Aid Access – an organization that mails abortion pills nationwide – and coerced her into taking pills in October 2023.In records released by Murrill’s office on Tuesday, law enforcement officials allege that Coeytaux mailed pills to a woman in Louisiana in October 2023 through Aid Access. However, in those documents, the woman does not indicate that she was coerced into taking the pills.A spokesperson for Murrill’s office declined to confirm whether Tuesday’s extradition request was connected to Markezich. “More indictments could be coming,” the spokesperson said in a text.The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group that has represented Markezich in other legal matters, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.A spokesperson for Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, also did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Coeytaux’s case.With abortions still on the rise more than three years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion opponents have intensified their efforts to penalize providers who operate using shield laws.In late 2024, Texas sued a New York-based doctor, Margaret Carpenter, for allegedly mailing abortion pills into the anti-abortion state. That litigation has so far faltered, however, thanks to New York’s shield law.Last year, Louisiana sought to extradite Carpenter from New York. But Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, said she would not execute the extradition request “not now, not ever”.