Texas Attorney General sues group that mails abortion pills to Texas
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a telemedicine abortion provider that says it mails abortion pills to Fort Worth and other Texas cities, his office announced Tuesday.
Paxton is suing the international organization Aid Access, which is based in Austria, as well as the group’s founder, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, and Dr. Remy Coeytaux, a physician based in California.
Paxton is accusing Coeytaux of mailing abortion pills to Texas, where abortion is illegal except in rare cases.
“Radicals sending abortion-inducing drugs into our state will be held accountable for ending innocent life,” Paxton said in a statement.
Aid Access and its physicians did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. On its website, Aid Access said it works “with U.S. based abortion providers in so called shield law states.” Shield laws are designed to protect providers of abortion and other services from out-of-state legal actions.
Abortion has been largely illegal in Texas since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the legal precedent established in Roe v. Wade, allowing individual states to regulate access to abortion. Abortion is only legal in Texas when a pregnant person “has a life-threatening physical condition” arising from the pregnancy.
But many people have continued accessing abortions through organizations like Aid Access and other groups, which send abortion pills through the mail. Research published in 2025 found that between July 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024, Aid Access provided 118,338 medication abortion pill packs, the majority to states like Texas with an abortion ban.
Most medication abortions involve the use of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol. The first drug, mifepristone, blocks hormones needed to continue a pregnancy. Misoprostol is taken 24 to 48 hours later and works by emptying the uterus. Medication abortion is different from the morning-after pill, which is a form of emergency contraception.
Medication abortions have become increasingly popular in the U.S. even as the total number and rate of abortion has declined in recent decades. In 2023, abortion pills were used in 63% of U.S. abortion in the formal health care system, according to research from the Guttmacher Institute.
Paxton previously filed a similar lawsuit against a telemedicine abortion provider based in Delaware.
