A judge in Texas told a doctor in New York to stop prescribing and sending abortion pills to patients in Texas right away. This could lead to a challenge to state “shield laws” that goes all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court told Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, who sees patients all over the country through telemedicine, on Thursday that she had to stop working and pay a fine of more than $100,000. In December, Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and a close friend of Donald Trump, filed the case.
A lot of people think the case will end up in the supreme court because it questions how strong “shield laws” are that protect doctors who perform abortions. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, these kinds of rules started to appear. They show that states are becoming more divided since then.
In a different case, Louisiana officials asked New York to extradite Carpenter on Thursday, but Kathy Hochul, the state’s Democratic governor, said the state would not do so.
Carpenter is being sued in Texas for giving an abortion pill-using 20-year-old woman mifepristone and misoprostol. Court records show that the “biological father of her unborn child” made a complaint with the attorney general after the woman went to her local emergency room for more care. Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, has told men to report situations in which they think their partners may have gotten this kind of abortion care and to file wrongful death lawsuits against the doctors and friends who helped.
Carpenter is accused of sending the same pills to a pregnant teen in Louisiana, according to a separate lawsuit. This is the first criminal charge of its kind.
Hochul said on Thursday, “I will not sign an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana! Not now, not ever.”
In a statement released on Thursday, the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which Carpenter leads, said, “Today’s extradition order from a prosecutor with an anti-abortion agenda is the latest escalation in Louisiana’s ongoing state-sponsored effort to prosecute safe and effective healthcare.” Carpenter herself has not said anything directly about either case.
According to the report, efforts by anti-abortion state leaders to limit access to abortion care are against New York state law and should stop.
Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, signed the warrant for Carpenter to show up in court there. On Thursday, he wrote on social media about the case, “There is only one right answer in this situation: the doctor must face extradition to Louisiana where justice will be served.”
Laws that protect
More than 40,000 people living in states with “shield laws” that don’t allow abortions got abortion pills in the last five months of 2023.
The University of California, Los Angeles says that since 2022, 23 states and Washington, DC have passed rules like this to protect providers of reproductive health care. The laws are different from past agreements between states on the law.
The laws cover different things in each state. For example, New York’s law says that state and local governments can’t help an out-of-state investigation of any “legally protected reproductive health activity” by cooperating, giving information, or using resources. It also says that the governor of the state can’t agree to any deportation requests.
The New York Times reports that Carpenter and her lawyers did not answer the Texas case or show up to court on Wednesday for a hearing before the judge because of that wording.
Carpenter’s group said before, “Shield laws are essential in protecting and enabling abortion care regardless of a patient’s ZIP code or ability to pay.”
Hochul told reporters at a press conference on Thursday about Louisiana’s extradition order, “We have put in place strict shield laws that are ready for this very situation.”
The first state to challenge shield laws in court was Texas, and the first person to be charged with a crime for doing so is Carpenter in Louisiana.
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