New York state moved to increase protections for abortion providers who mail pills out of state, days after a Louisiana grand jury indicted a New York doctor for allegedly doing just that.
New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, on Monday signed into law a bill that permits doctors to request that their names be left off prescriptions for abortion pills. Instead, they can use the names of their medical practices.
“In deeply conservative states, they’ve weaponized the courts against providers, in state and out,” Hochul said in a press conference. She continued: “Other states, they want to target, harass, scare, intimidate doctors and patients. That may be OK in a place like Louisiana, maybe Indiana. But those are not our values in the state of New York. No.”
The new law arrives in the wake of intensified efforts to prosecute providers who use telemedicine to prescribe abortions to residents of states with abortion bans. These providers operate under the auspices of “shield laws”, which have been enacted in a number of blue states since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. They generally aim to protect abortion providers by refusing to comply with red-state requests to prosecute them.
Shield laws have proven vital to maintaining abortion access in the US post-Roe. Between April and June of last year, providers offered nearly 10,000 abortions each month through shield laws, according to data from #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.
However, shield laws have gone largely untried in courts – and red states are now aiming to put them to the test. Late last year, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based provider, who allegedly prescribed abortion pills to a 20-year-old Texan. Carpenter is also the subject of last week’s indictment by a Louisiana grand jury, which alleges she prescribed a pill in that state.
Louisiana law-enforcement officials also indicted the mother of a minor who was allegedly given the pill.
On Monday, Hochul vowed: “Never, under any circumstances, will I sign an extradition agreement that sends our doctor into harm’s way, to be prosecuted as a criminal for simply following her oath.”
Louisiana discovered Carpenter’s name, Hochul said, because it was on the prescription bottle.
“After today, that will no longer happen,” she said.
