Some Much-Needed Good News Out of Alabama

Since 2022, Alabama’s attorney general has been threatening to prosecute people who travel for an abortion. This week, a federal judge ruled that the state definitely can't do that.

By Kylie Cheung | April 3, 2025 | 2:32pm

Photo: Getty Images Abortion Latest

Some Much-Needed Good News Out of Alabama

Since 2022, abortion funds and advocates in Alabama have had their hands tied amid ongoing threats from the state’s attorney general to criminalize abortion-related travel and support. This week, a federal judge settled the legal dispute and ruled that the state can’t prosecute people for getting abortions in states where it’s legal, nor for helping people travel to get this care. “Alabama’s criminal jurisdiction does not reach beyond its borders, and it cannot punish what its residents do lawfully in another State,” wrote Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. He added that prosecuting a person for helping someone get a legal abortion “would violate both the First Amendment and the right to travel.”

Abortion has been totally banned in Alabama since June 2022. In September 2022 and again in August 2023, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) declared that helping someone travel for abortion amounts to a “criminal conspiracy” and threatened to prosecute those who “aid and abet” legal, out-of-state abortions—including by funding their travel. So, in July 2023, the Yellowhammer Fund and West Alabama Women’s Center (WAWC) filed a joint lawsuit against Marshall, represented by the Lawyering Project and ACLU of Alabama.

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Marshall’s threats were always bullshit: Interstate travel for abortion is legal and constitutionally protected no matter where you live. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped several states and counties from passing measures to restrict abortion-related travel or some acts of helping people travel for the procedure. In 2023, Idaho lawmakers enacted a law to criminalize “abortion trafficking,” rendering it a felony to “harbor” or “transport” minors across state lines to access abortion; parts of this law have been blocked in court. Last year, Tennessee enacted its own version of the law, which is also being challenged in court. Across Texas, at least 13 different jurisdictions have enacted bans on abortion-related travel on their roads since 2023. (Enforcement of these measures seems impossible, but experts say confusion and scaring people into not helping others is the point.)

That said, Thompson’s ruling couldn’t come at a better time. Meagan Burrows, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said she hopes the ruling “sends a strong message to any and all anti-abortion politicians who are considering similar efforts to muzzle health care providers or penalize those who assist others.”

“Today is a good day for pregnant Alabamians who need lawful out-of-state abortion care,” Jenice Fountain, executive director of Yellowhammer Fund, said on Monday. “The efforts of Alabama’s attorney general to isolate pregnant people from their communities and support systems has failed.” Robin Marty, executive director, West Alabama Women’s Center, said she’s “thrilled” by the ruling, which means her clinic is “once again able to inform our patients and other pregnant Alabamians about where and how to safely obtain legal, time-sensitive abortion care outside of Alabama, and to point them towards resources that can help them in traveling across state lines.”

Alabama Women’s Center’s Dr. Yashica Robinson also celebrated the ruling, adding that the “notion of criminalizing us for providing vital information and support to our patients is not just ludicrous but counter to everything a patient expects from their health care provider.”

Thompson’s ruling was appropriately scathing: “The Attorney General’s characterization of the right to travel as merely a right to move physically between the States contravenes history, precedent, and common sense,” he wrote. “Such a constrained conception of the right to travel would erode the privileges of national citizenship and is inconsistent with the Constitution.” He further argued that, if citizens can travel out-of-state for a legal procedure, advocates like abortion funds similarly have a right to help them: “If a State cannot outright prohibit the plaintiffs’ clients from traveling to receive lawful out-of-state abortions, it cannot accomplish the same end indirectly by prosecuting those who assist them.”

Speaking to Jezebel in August, Fountain said that Marshall’s threats had a widespread “chilling effect”—in large part, because Alabamians have long had to fear criminal charges related to pregnancy and abortion. Alabama leads all other states in volume of pregnancy-related criminal cases in the country between 2006 and 2022, tracking from Pregnancy Justice in 2023 shows.

Being forced to keep track of overly complicated policies has presented a massive barrier to abortion access in the state. It didn’t help that for almost three years, abortion funds, health care providers, and other advocates had to worry that even providing information came with some threat of criminalization. Under Alabama’s ban, many people don’t know their options, or by the time they learn they can legally travel for abortion, they’re overwhelmed by all the steps in front of them—scraping together funds, traveling to Illinois, missing work and school, scrambling for child care. “So, they’ll just deal with birthing, then, or maybe they’ll spend their rent and they’ll be [financially] set back for a long, long time, for [abortion],” Fountain said last summer.

At the same time as this important win for the right to abortion-related travel and the right to support abortion-related travel, some states are finding other ways to trap people under their abortion bans: by blocking out-of-state abortion providers from mailing medication abortion across state lines, which remains legal. Louisiana and Texas have spent the last several months waging an aggressive, ongoing legal war on a New York abortion provider for allegedly mailing pills into their states. In December, Tennessee Republicans introduced legislation to penalize shipping pills into the state with a $5 million fine; Texas Republicans rolled out a similar bill in January. And, this week, West Virginia Republicans proposed their own such bill. On the federal level, Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested to Louisiana officials she’d look into some standardization of regulations on the interstate shipment of abortion pills, at a time when top anti-abortion leaders are fiending for the Trump administration to enforce the Comstock Act against the medication.

So, we have all that to worry about. Nonetheless, this week’s ruling in Alabama is a “step in the right direction,” Marty said, and a win for abortion-related travel at a crucial time.