For the past three years, Indiana Republicans have effectively prohibited Planned Parenthood from performing any abortions in the state. As a result, when patients go to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Indiana and request abortion services, the clinic informs the patients that they can’t do it.
But clinics also tell the patients where they can obtain abortion services. Indiana’s neighboring states—Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio—have stronger protections for reproductive freedom. So Planned Parenthood provides patients with information about what services are legal and available in which places, by doing things like directing patients to provider websites, giving them handouts, or placing phone calls for referrals to out-of-state providers.
Indiana Republicans argue that this is illegal, too. Under state law, no one may “aid or assist” a pregnant minor in getting an abortion without first getting permission from their parent or guardian. In order to prove to Indiana’s satisfaction that they received such permission, people must obtain the parent’s notarized written consent, along with government-issued proof of the consenting parent’s identification and some evidence that the consenting individual is in fact the minor’s parent.
For anyone who fails to meet these requirements, Indiana law allows parents to sue for money damages, and further authorizes the state’s Medical Licensing Board to take disciplinary action against medical practitioners. Possible punishments for medical providers accused of violating the aid-or-assist law range from fines and reprimands to suspension or permanent revocation of their medical license.
In court filings, the Indiana attorney general’s office argued that giving patients information about legal out-of-state abortion services constitutes “aid or assistance” under the law. Therefore, Indiana claimed, the state Medical Licensing Board can discipline any Planned Parenthood practitioners who talk to minor patients about their legal abortion options without first receiving notarized permission from their parents.
The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” Yet Indiana contended that there was no constitutional problem with punishing Planned Parenthood for talking about abortion. According to Indiana, Planned Parenthood’s speech was “integral to unlawful conduct,” so the First Amendment’s protections didn’t apply.
Last week, a federal appeals court ruled otherwise. In Planned Parenthood v. Commissioner of the Indiana State Department of Health, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals stressed that Planned Parenthood had not, in fact, facilitated any crime. A practitioner’s speech could be “integral to unlawful conduct” if they were helping a minor obtain “an illegal abortion in Indiana,” explained Judge David Hamilton. But Indiana’s abortion requirements “simply do not apply to the activities of out-of-state providers.”
Indiana further argued that Planned Parenthood’s speech was still integral to unlawful conduct even if the abortion was performed legally in another state, because the conversation occurred in Indiana and thus undermined Indiana law. The Seventh Circuit panel rejected this argument as “circular.” In essence, said Hamilton, Indiana’s legal theory was that “the speech is illegal because it is illegal.” The First Amendment “demands more,” he said.
Finally, Indiana claimed that the information Planned Parenthood provided was not protected speech because the state’s “aid or assist” law regulates conduct—aiding a minor in getting an abortion—and that the effect on speech was “merely incidental.” The Seventh Circuit rejected this argument, too, citing the Supreme Court’s March 2026 decision in Chiles v. Salazar. That case concerned a Colorado law that banned licensed mental health counselors from practicing talk-based “conversion therapy” with minors. In Chiles, the Court held that Colorado’s law triggered strict scrutiny with respect to a practitioner who “seeks to engage only in speech.” Similarly, Hamilton wrote, Indiana’s law triggers strict scrutiny with respect to a practitioner who seeks to only engage in speech “about care that is lawful in other states.”
The decision in Planned Parenthood v. Commissioner of the Indiana State Department of Health confirms that factual information about legal abortion is “plainly speech” that triggers the First Amendment’s protections. Indiana officials are free to “disagree” with other states’ policies and with the purposes of Planned Parenthood’s speech, Hamilton wrote. “They cannot, however, make it illegal to provide information about lawful conduct in other states.”
Back in June 2022, when the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Roe v. Wade had wrongly “declared a winning side” in a “rancorous national controversy,” and that reversing Roe would allow “each state” to regulate abortion “as its citizens wish.” Yet in the years since, abortion opponents have repeatedly sought to enforce their states’ restrictions beyond their borders. In Texas, for instance, men have sued former partners and friends who accessed legal abortion care from out-of-state providers. Louisiana has tried to prosecute a New York doctor for prescribing legal abortion medication to a patient in Baton Rouge. In May 2026, Alito dissented from an order in a case about telehealth prescriptions for abortion medication, complaining bitterly that states like New York were perpetrating a “scheme” to “undermine” Dobbs.
Anti-abortion activists did not actually want states to regulate abortion as they see fit. They wanted to compel other states’ compliance with their own regulations. For now, at least, they cannot.
