Federal judge temporarily blocks Tennessee law protecting minors from abortion trafficking

A Tennessee law protecting children from being trafficking out of state to undergo abortions has been temporarily blocked, with a federal judge taking issue with a single word in the phrasing of the law.

HB 1895 was signed into law by Governor Bill Lee in May. Under the law, anyone who “intentionally recruits, harbors, or transports” a minor to another state for an abortion, without the consent of the minor’s parents, will be subject to a Class A misdemeanor, which comes with mandatory jail time of nearly a year.

Within a month, a pro-abortion state Democrat and a Nashville attorney filed a lawsuit seeking to have the law blocked. According to Rep. Aftyn Behn and Rachel Welty, the wording of the law is “unconstitutionally vague,” specifically pointing out the word “recruit” as potentially violating freedom of speech.

U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger agreed, granting their request for a temporary restraining order against the law. Strangely, in the ruling, Trauger explicitly acknowledged both Behn and Welty’s pro-abortion bias in this suit, including Behn promising she would take minors out of state for abortions, even if she ended up arrested for doing so. Trauger wrote:

Welty is an attorney and “advocate for safe and healthy access to abortion care.” She is “a member of an abortion fund that provides resources to clients who need safe and healthy access to legal abortion medication and legal out-of-state abortion care that they can no longer obtain in Tennessee.” Welty performs most of her advocacy and assistance work in Middle Tennessee, and, while that has taken her throughout the region, she testified at the hearing that her work is largely concentrated in Davidson County and the adjacent counties. Her work is not limited to unemancipated minors, but it also does not exclude them.

Welty’s role in assisting Tennesseans, including minors, in overcoming obstacles to abortion care is well known to the public, and her work has been covered by local media. When Tennessee, pre-Dobbs, permitted some unemancipated minors to obtain abortion care without parental consent through the state’s judicial bypass process, Welty was often the attorney who represented the minor. She says that many of her clients during that period were victims of rape and incest.

… Behn is a social worker, as well as an elected Representative to the Tennessee General Assembly. Behn’s outspoken support of abortion rights has caused her to become increasingly identified with the issue of abortion access, particularly since Dobbs was decided. She testified that her office now receives calls from individuals throughout the state who are personally facing the need for abortion services that Tennessee has made effectively impossible to obtain without leaving its borders. Behn, like Welty, wants to help but fears prosecution.

One of the more striking flashpoints in Behn’s public identification with these issues occurred during the legislative debate on Chapter 1032. The dispute began, as many do, on social media. On April 10, 2024, when Chapter 1032 had not yet passed, Behn posted the following to
one of her social media accounts:

This morning, the TN Senate will vote on SB1971/HB1895, which would criminalize supporting young people who are considering or seeking abortion with mandatory jail time and the possibility of an over $1 million lawsuit.

Should this bill pass, I welcome arrest.

The post included a graphic quoting Behn as saying, “I welcome the opportunity to take a young person out of state who wants to have an abortion even if it lands me in jail.”

For her part, Trauger appeared to agree with Welty and Behn that the law is a threat to free speech.

“No one associated with (the law) seems to have a particularly clear picture of what the provision is supposed to prohibit — not the prosecutors who will be called on to enforce it; not the state attorneys called on to defend the statute in court; and, it seems, not even the individuals who drafted the provision itself,” Trauger wrote in her ruling, adding, “The freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is not simply a special protection that the Constitution grants to a few, high-profile speakers so that those speakers can hear themselves talk; it is a protection available to everyone, for the interconnected benefit of everyone, because messages do not gain their fullest power by being uttered, but by being spread.”

She added, “Welty and Behn do not just have a right to speak their message; they have a right to live in a state where that message can be repeated by all who find it valuable to all who wish to hear it. Otherwise, there would be no actual freedom of speech — just freedom of a few speakers to address a silenced populace.”

Jason Zachary, a pro-life state representative who argued in favor of the law, responded with a statement on X, saying this was an issue of parental rights above all else.

“Abortion is a settled issue in TN. We have prohibited the elective killing of a baby in the womb. We do have an exception for the life of the mother,” he wrote. “The law in question is about parental rights, period. The language prohibits an adult who is not the parent/guardian of a minor from facilitating an abortion for that minor without the parent’s consent. This is common sense. Unfortunately, the radical left’s obsession with aborting babies led to this legal challenge. I’m confident our AG will successfully defend the law, securing parents rights to make decisions for their child.”

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