Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has issued cease-and-desist letters to six companies found to be illegally advertising, facilitating, and enabling the sale and procurement of chemical abortion-inducing drugs to consumers in Alabama.
“Alabama’s law is clear, abortion is illegal in this state,” Marshall said in a press release Tuesday. “These companies are not only breaking the law, they are deceiving Alabama consumers about the very real dangers of these drugs. That stops now. Anyone who tries to exploit Alabamians for profit while flouting our laws will be prosecuted to the fullest extent permitted by law.”
Abortion has been illegal in the state since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to choose their own legal limits on abortion. Alabama’s law makes it a Class A Felony for a physician to perform an abortion in the state.
That law, however, explicitly carved out protections for the women who seek abortions, which leaves medication abortions unable to be prosecuted in the state.
Anti-abortion lawmakers across the country—the vast majority of them Republicans—have been trying to ban the abortion pill, known as Mifepristone, at the federal level. Those attempts have not yet been successful though in the courts, leaving a route for women to obtain an abortion in states that have otherwise made them illegal.
Each cease-and-desist letter demands that the recipient company halt all advertising, sale, and delivery of abortion-inducing drugs to consumers in Alabama. Failure or refusal to comply, Marshall said, will trigger a formal investigation and possible legal action for unlawful trade practices, which can include civil penalties up to $2,000 per violation under Alabama’s consumer protection statutes.
Under Alabama law, the use, prescription, or administration of any “medicine, drug, or any other substance or device with the intent to terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant” is illegal. It is thus unlawful, Marshall concluded, for out-of-state companies to send abortifacients by mail to individuals in Alabama.
The cease-and-desist letters were sent to Plan C, a project of Possibility Labs, San Francisco, CA; Southern Woven, New York, NY; ybycmeds, Sanborn, NY; Abortion Pills in Private, United Arab Emirates; Red State Access, New York, NY; and Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants, Cambridge, MA.
Before abortion became illegal in the state, about 60 percent of all abortions in Alabama were by medication rather than surgical procedures.
