OUSTON — Deep rifts have emerged among the hundreds of elected district attorneys who will be charged with enforcing the expanding restrictions on abortion, creating a Balkanized new legal system within states that are banning the procedure. 

Dozens of Democratic prosecutors who represent liberal pockets in conservative states already have vowed to resist bans by refusing to bring charges against abortion providers. But in many rural areas and outlying suburbs, conservative prosecutors have said they will enforce their state bans. 

An opening salvo came this week, just days after the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion, when a prominent anti-abortion group in Texas urged the police and prosecutors in Dallas and Houston to open criminal investigations into three abortion clinics that the group said were preparing to violate the law by scheduling abortions. 

“It is your duty to uphold the law and investigate crimes,” the group, Texas Right to Life, said in its letter, in which it claimed to have phone recordings of clinic employees. “We urge you and your officers to investigate this abortion clinic.” 

The demand was quickly made moot when a judge temporarily blocked attempts to resurrect the state’s long-dormant, century-old abortion law in the weeks before a new ban takes effect, but it marked the beginning of an explosive new battle over abortion in America: How prosecutors and the police will enforce laws that criminalize abortion in two dozen states, some of them carrying penalties of up to 15 years in prison.