South Dakota Can't Stop Website From Informing Women About Abortion Pills |
Abortion
South Dakota Can't Stop Website From Informing Women About Abortion Pills
And it can't ban a former state lawmaker from wearing a sweatshirt that advertises that website, either.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 7.20.2026 12:07 PM
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South Dakota can't stop a website from telling women of that state about abortion pills and where to get them—at least not yet. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the state from enforcing its new anti-abortion advertising law against Mayday Health.
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Mayday Health runs a website with information about where people can obtain abortion pills, including pills prescribed remotely and mailed to women in states—like South Dakota—where abortion is banned.
Notably, Mayday doesn't provide abortion pill prescriptions itself—just information. Nonetheless, South Dakota has been engaged in a monthslong First Amendment battle with the group, beginning with a cease-and-desist letter sent last December over the group's gas station ads for its website.
In March, South Dakota passed a ban on abortion advertising by amending its existing abortion-ban law. The new law says "no person may knowingly dispense, distribute, sell, or advertise any…article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing an abortion" or any "article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing that is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion." It also authorized the state's attorney general to sue in civil court over alleged violations of the law.
Mayday sued, calling this new anti-abortion advertising law unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Camela Theeler seems poised to agree with Mayday. On Friday, Theeler issued a preliminary injunction against South Dakota enforcing the law against Mayday or against lawyer and former state senator Nancy Turbak Berry.
As part of Mayday's lawsuit, Berry had argued that she could be advertising abortion by wearing a Mayday sweatshirt.
Although the state says "that Turbak can wear her sweatshirt without fear of prosecution, [it has] not disavowed the State's authority to prosecute Turbak or persons like Turbak," noted Theeler, holding that Turbak does have standing to sue. "While the [state] cast the message on Turbak's Mayday sweatshirt as mere advocacy, the message her sweatshirt conveys is markedly similar to the message on Mayday's gas station placards—a message that the Defendants argue would violate South Dakota law."
Theeler went on to note that South Dakota's abortion advertising law is a content-based restriction on speech. And there's a high bar for such restrictions being constitutional.
There are limits and exceptions, of........