The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has sued a New York doctor over accusations that she mailed abortion pills to a Texas woman in defiance of the state’s ban on the procedure.
The lawsuit will test the power of “shield laws”, a post-Roe v Wade strategy designed to protect abortion providers and enable access to pills for women in states that have banned abortion.
Filed in Collin county, Texas, and announced on Friday, the lawsuit alleges that Dr Megan Carpenter sent abortion pills to a 20-year-old Texas woman through telemedicine. After the woman sought medical attention for severe bleeding in July, the “biological father of the unborn child” suspected that she had sought to end her pregnancy without informing him and found the abortion pills, according to the lawsuit.
Because Carpenter is based in New York, Paxton’s lawsuit will come up against New York’s shield law, which dictates that officials in the state not cooperate with attempts by other states to sue or prosecute providers who send abortion pills to people in states that ban abortion. Seven other states have passed similar shield laws since the US supreme court overturned Roe.
These laws have proven critical to maintaining post-Roe access to abortion. On average, in every month between April and June of 2024, shield laws helped providers send pills to more than 9,700 people who live in states with near-total abortion bans, six-week bans or restrictions on telemedicine abortion, according to #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.
This lawsuit will mark the first time shield laws are tested in court, pitting the laws of two states against one another.
“This was inevitable,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis, school of law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. “This is going to be a state-to-state conflict.”
Ziegler added: “The goal, I think in part, is to intimidate physicians by saying: ‘We’re coming for you personally.’”
Mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs that the lawsuit accuses Carpenter of mailing, are commonly utilized in US abortions and are safe and effective when used to end pregnancies in the first trimester. The lawsuit indicates that the woman’s pregnancy ended at around nine weeks, but it is not clear whether she suffered long-term health consequences.
The woman’s degree of involvement in the lawsuit is also not clear. Paxton’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
“In Texas, we treasure the health and lives of mothers and babies, and this is why out-of-state doctors may not illegally and dangerously prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents,” Paxton said in a statement.
Paxton’s lawsuit is asking for a temporary injunction against Carpenter that would stop her from prescribing abortion pills to Texas residents and from practicing telemedicine in Texas, where Carpenter allegedly does not hold a medical license. The lawsuit also asks that Carpenter be fined $100,000 for each violation of Texas law, as well as cover any attorneys’ fees that Texas incurs.
Ziegler said that it is not clear whether New York law would protect Carpenter from having to pay those fines if Paxton prevails.
New York law also enables Carpenter to argue that Paxton’s lawsuit constitutes “unlawful interference with protected rights”, meaning she could potentially file a lawsuit of her own. If Texas or Carpenter win money through a lawsuit but their respective state courts refuse to force them to pay, the litigation could end in front of the US supreme court, Ziegler said.
Carpenter is a founder and co-medical director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which works to expand access to shield laws and help doctors navigate them. The organization did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
“As other states move to attack those who provide or obtain abortion care, New York is proud to be a safe haven for abortion access,” the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said in a statement after news of Paxton’s lawsuit broke.
“We will always protect our providers from unjust attempts to punish them for doing their job and we will never cower in the face of intimidation or threats.”
