A federal appeals court has permanently struck down Tennessee’s recruitment clause in its abortion-trafficking statute.
Tennessee cannot stop individuals from informing teenagers about how to obtain abortions in other states, according to a new ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
The dispute centers on Tennessee’s Underage Abortion Trafficking Act, which makes it a crime to “recruit” a minor for any abortion procedure that would be illegal under Tennessee law.
In Tennessee, nearly all abortions are considered criminal. And with its abortion-trafficking provision, the state “claims to extend beyond Tennessee’s own regulation of abortion within its borders,” wrote Judge Jane B. Stranch in the court’s opinion, released on September 24. The recruitment clause bans “recruitment for abortions that are illegal in Tennessee but legal where they occur.”
The court did not accept this approach, ruling in favor of abortion-rights advocates Rachel Welty and Aftyn Behn by upholding a lower court’s permanent injunction against the recruitment provision.
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Free Speech and Reproductive Freedom
Welty and Behn guide Tennesseans—including minors—on how to obtain abortions in other states where the procedure is legal. They argued that making this illegal violates their First Amendment rights, a claim that the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee had previously accepted.
The Sixth Circuit has now affirmed that ruling, concluding that the recruitment provision is overly broad and constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
The case sits at a crossroads of reproductive freedom and free expression—an intersection that might seem unusual but is densely populated. In many places, attempts to enforce abortion bans have also entangled talk about places where abortion is not prohibited.
The dispute also serves as a clear example of how anti-abortion politicians employ inflammatory language to rally support for their policies.
“Underage abortion trafficking” evokes an image of coercion of pregnant teenagers. And “recruitment” implies aggressive marketing and pressure, perhaps even coercion.
Yet the statute’s wording is broader. It criminalizes an adult who “intentionally recruits, harbors, or transports a pregnant unemancipated minor” to obtain an abortion for the minor, to obtain abortion pills for them, or to hide an abortion from their parents or guardians.
As written, the law could be used against people like Welty, a Nashville family-law attorney who concentrates on child advocacy and sometimes assists minors seeking abortions without parental consent. “There may be many reasons they don’t seek parental consent, including that the parent may be abusive,” Welty said at a preliminary induction hearing cited by the Sixth Circuit. Her aim as an advocate, she said, is to present options and let the individual decide, not to persuade them toward a particular choice.
It could also reach Behn, a social worker and Tennessee state representative. With pregnant clients who seek social-work services, she aims to provide information so they can make informed decisions and to create a space that won’t stigmatize or threaten them. If a client chooses to have an abortion, Behn offers information or directs them to resources that facilitate lawful out-of-state access.
Welty and Behn challenged the recruitment provision as it relates to obtaining an abortion (not concealing one).
“As applied to Welty and Behn, the Recruitment Provision curtails their free speech about abortion; it is therefore a content-based regulation that is presumptively unconstitutional,” the Sixth Circuit held, noting that their speech falls outside any exception for speech integral to committing a crime—because they encourage minors to obtain legal abortions, not illegal ones.
Cue: Conversion Therapy?
The Sixth Circuit’s ruling leans in part on a recent Supreme Court decision (in Chiles v. Salazar) that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy was unconstitutional.
Similar to Colorado’s approach—which permitted counselors to support and affirm same-sex attraction but not to promote efforts to diminish or suppress it—the Tennessee statute allows adults to encourage continued pregnancy or share information about adoption but bars suggesting abortion as an option or supporting a minor who has already chosen that path, the court noted.
“Like Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban, the Recruitment Provision prevents them from voicing certain viewpoints the State disfavors when advising consenting clients,” Stranch observed:
At its core, both laws regulate speech about personal choices that the states disfavour; Chiles confirms such speech receives full First Amendment protection even when directed at minors. Because both laws restrict which perspectives a speaker may express about those disfavored choices, they amount to a stark instance of content discrimination, raising significant First Amendment concerns.
When I covered Chiles, some people online mocked the idea that striking down the ban could benefit liberals or progressives too. Now this ruling makes that point clear.
Cheers and Dissent
“The Sixth Circuit has reaffirmed what the Constitution has always required: Tennessee cannot criminalize speech about topics that a Republican supermajority and the Attorney General deem wrong, and it cannot export its abortion ban across state lines to regulate conduct that its own laws do not govern,” Behn said in a Facebook post.
Yet the circuit’s chief judge, Jeffrey Sutton, diverged in a dissent. He asserted that Tennessee’s Underage Abortion Trafficking Act does not necessarily reach the kinds of speech and counseling Behn and Welty engage in.
“They simply want to keep advocating for changes to abortion policy in Tennessee and continue providing information that helps a person decide whether to have an abortion—to pregnant minors and to adults,” Sutton wrote. In his view, the state contends this is permissible; prosecutors “agree that the plaintiffs’ past and planned future counseling do not violate the statute” and deny any intent to prosecute them for such activities under the new law.
“If I were deciding this case, I would give both sides what they want,” Sutton added. “For the plaintiffs, that means continuing their stated activities, because the law does not apply to mere advocacy and counseling but only to the deliberate recruitment of Tennessee children—at least to induce them to obtain abortions that Tennessee law bans. For the State, it would mean upholding the law with a clarified, narrower scope.”
Granted, the plain text of the statute does not necessarily target Welty and Behn’s activities, but its breadth leaves room for such enforcement.
Followup
Border cellphone searches: Do you recall George Anibowei, the U.S. citizen who has endured five warrantless searches of his phone by immigration officers? The Constitutional Accountability Center, the Cato Institute, and the Rutherford Institute have taken an interest in his case, as reported by Tosin Akintola of Reason.
What began as a narrow constitutional exception now risks expanding to undermine the protection it was meant to limit, according to an amicus brief filed recently by the Cato Institute urging the Supreme Court to revisit a petition about warrantless border searches of Americans…
Another amicus brief, from the Constitutional Accountability Center, argues that the border-search exception clashes with the Court’s Riley decision, effectively allowing federal agents to rummage through devices’ contents at will and expanding government power to seize personal documents indiscriminately. The Rutherford Institute’s brief echoes this concern, arguing that the exception is used more often to erode civil liberties than to advance legitimate border-security interests.
Whether the Supreme Court will take up Anibowei’s case remains uncertain. The Court denied his initial petition for certiorari in 2024.
On Substack
Are phones saving romance rather than wrecking it? “Smartphones aren’t responsible for the decline in dating and childbearing, but they might help reverse it,” writes Chelsea Olivia Follett in Past Imperfect.
Technology has long faced blame for hindering family formation. Recent Northwestern University research suggests the typewriter reduced birth rates by drawing more women into the workforce. Yet that same era also saw many “office romance” marriages—and likely many children.
Today, devices still connect couples, even as smartphones are blamed for a broader drop in fertility. The evidence that phones reduce fertility is not as strong as popular belief; for instance, Italy’s fertility decline preceded widespread smartphone use in many cases.
Research comparing couples who met online versus offline shows varied outcomes; some studies hint at slightly higher marital satisfaction among online matches and somewhat lower rates of separation and divorce. Digital introductions may foster lasting partnerships, and divorce rates have dipped to levels not seen in fifty years, particularly among highly committed millennial couples who met online.
While dating apps remain the primary way couples connect, there is still substantial room for improvement. Across many countries, rates of couple formation—and thus fertility—fell even as most young singles still aim for marriage.
Follett further explains how artificial intelligence is being leveraged in matchmaking.
Scoop: The National Security Agency is spending billions this year on testing AI models – far more than previously known
According to a classified NSA estimate described by sources
Compute costs for AI have exploded – including for taxpayers
— Jeff Stein (@jstein_sun) September 24, 2026
• “When I asked, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection didn’t deny that the agency uses facial recognition to identify sex workers,” notes former U.S. diplomat Josef Burton.
• The New York Times analyzes Amazon’s drone-delivery program in Texas.
• “Police seeking to use a device that mimics a cellphone tower to locate people must obtain a warrant, a Fourth Circuit panel ruled,” reports Courthouse News.
• The federal government is moving to intervene in the European Commission’s case against X Corp, which was fined €120,000,000 for violations of the EU’s Digital Services Act. “The European Commission attempted to broaden its regulatory reach to American firms not present or operating within its jurisdiction,” said Bretta A. Shumate, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil division, in a statement.
• Sheldon Yakiwchuk dissects Canada’s new Safe Social Media Act: “The government doesn’t silence anyone directly; it just makes taking down posts cheaper than defending them.”
• How footage from domestic robots is increasingly used as evidence in court.
• In a bipartisan Senate hearing, Lindsey Isaacs described her challenging legal fight linked to Flock Safety’s automatic license-plate-reader network—an issue raising concerns about police accountability and oversight. Reason’s Autumn Billings covers the discussion, noting that without stronger oversight, errors like Isaacs’ are likely to recur.
