I read through the whole thread in multiple sittings but I lost the plot while considering whether to respond to individual commenters.
The Supreme Court has long held that states cannot enforce laws outside their jurisdiction. See, e.g., Huntington v. Atrill, 146 US 657, which said:
Laws have no force of themselves beyond the jurisdiction of the State which enacts them, and can have extra-territorial effect only by the comity of other States. The general rules of international comity upon this subject were well summed up, before the American Revolution, by Chief Justice De Grey, as reported by Sir William Blackstone: "Crimes are in their nature local, and the jurisdiction of crimes is local. And so as to the rights of real property, the subject being fixed and immovable. But personal injuries are of a transitory nature, and sequuntur forum rei. " Rafael v. Verelst, 2 W. Bl. 1055, 1058.
Crimes and offences against the laws of any State can only be defined, prosecuted and pardoned by the sovereign authority of that State; and the authorities, legislative, executive or judicial, of other States take no action with regard to them, except by way of extradition to surrender offenders to the State whose laws they have violated, and whose peace they have broken.
There was an earlier thread on this same topic once a few years ago. In it, I noted a Supreme Court case about a publisher who was charged with violating a Virginia law that said, “If any person, by publication, lecture, advertisement, or by the sale or circulation of any publication, or in any other manner, encourage or prompt the procuring of abortion or miscarriage, he shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” A publisher in Virginia was running ads for a service in New York that was advertising to refer Virginia women to NY abortion providers. The publisher’s conviction under the law was overturned by the court on first amendment grounds.
In dicta, the court noted:
Moreover, the placement services advertised in appellant’s newspaper were legally provided in New York at that time.[8] The Virginia Legislature could not have regulated the advertiser’s activity in New York, and obviously could not have proscribed the activity in that State.[9] Huntington v. Attrill, 146 U. S. 657, 669 (1892). Neither could Virginia prevent its residents from traveling to New York to obtain those services or, as the State conceded, Tr. of Oral Arg. 29, prosecute them for going there. See United States v. Guest, 383 U. S. 745, 757-759 (1966); Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U. S. 618, 629-631 (1969); Doe v. Bolton, 410 U. S., at 200. Virginia possessed no authority to regulate the services provided in New York—the skills and credentials of the New York physicians and of the New York professionals who assisted them, the standards of the New York hospitals and clinics to which patients were referred, or the practices and charges of the New York referral services.
A State does not acquire power or supervision over the internal affairs of another State merely because the welfare and health of its own citizens may be affected when they travel to that State. It may seek to disseminate information so as to enable its citizens to make better informed decisions when they leave. But it may not, under the guise of exercising internal police powers, bar a citizen of another State from disseminating information about an activity that is legal in that State.
But the question has moved to the thornier issue of whether a state could prohibit conspiracy within a state to procure an abortion that is legal in another state. I have no doubt the Supreme Court of 1975 would have said that interfered with a person’s fundamental right to travel to another state and to benefit while in that state from the privileges and immunities granted to that states’ citizens. Today’s court? Fat chance. We no longer have a Constitution based on application of legal principles. We suffer under a Constitution twisted by the whims of five anti-democratic partisan hacks and one Republican appointee who agrees with them often enough that we can say he is part of the problem.