Ken Paxton Wants to Implement Texas’ Abortion Ban…in Europe

After spending over a year trying—and failing—to sue a New York-based doctor for allegedly violating Texas’ total abortion ban, the anti-abortion attorney general Ken Paxton is now trying to terrorize Europe.

On February 24, Paxton sued Austria-based Aid Access, California-based Dr. Remy Coeytaux, and Netherlands-based Dr. Rebecca Gomberts for running “an international abortion-by-mail enterprise that illegally ships abortion-inducing drugs into Texas,” dramatically alleging they run an “illegal operation.” Translation: they serve the thousands of Americans who receive life-saving care through telehealth abortions, which accounted for 27% of abortions for the first half of 2025.

“The idea that [mifepristone is] unapproved medications, this is a black market, that is all smoke and mirrors, trying to make what people do to access care when that care is difficult to access in a broken health care system; seem as though it is some sort of vast criminal conspiracy when it is just simply not,” Farah Diaz-Tello, a senior counsel and legal director at If/When/How, told Jezebel.

This is Paxton’s approximate fourth lawsuit attempting to take down abortion medication. In late January, he sued a Delaware-based provider using nothing but news clippings where she talked about helping people in the Lone Star State. In December 2024, he sued New York-based Dr. Carpenter for allegedly mailing abortion pills to a Texas resident, though his lawsuit never made it past the state’s shield laws—which he also filed a lawsuit against. His efforts against Dr. Carpenter grew so tired that a county clerk wrote in one of the rejections, “While I’m not entirely sure how things work in Texas, here in New York, a rejection means the matter is closed.”

The state restricted mail-order abortion pills in 2021, but it was further enforced in December, when HB 7 was enacted, ironically titled the Woman and Child Protection Act, which allows private citizens to sue anyone who “manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides” abortion pills to someone in Texas, for $100,000. In February, a Texas man with an ongoing lawsuit against Coeytaux refiled the lawsuit to try to collect a cash bounty for having turned his partner in after she allegedly received pills from the doctor. (Weekly reminder that mifepristone is safe, despite whatever the Trump administration says.) 

Aid Access and Gomberts were the subject of another lawsuit in Texas filed in August by Jonathan Mitchell, who’s also been going after Coeytaux since July. “I think they’re realizing that they can’t stop that—and trying to do everything they can to try,” Diaz-Tello emphasized. 

Paxton’s latest complaint cites a part of Aid Access’ website that says medications can be sent to Houston, San Antonia, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, El Paso, or anywhere else in Texas, and points to a testimony from a “woman who had an abortion.” Conveniently left out, however, is that the same testimony also says, “This process literally saved my life” and “I would not have survived this pregnancy.” Imagine that.

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