She Was Caught Illegally Sending Them to Texas
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has filed a lawsuit against a New York doctor after she illegally prescribed abortion pills to a Texas woman, which will be the first legal battle between a pro-life state and a pro-abortion state.
While New York has a shield law enabling doctors to illegally send abortion pills to women in states where the pill is illegal, Texas has argued that this law is unacceptable and has demanded legal remedies. According to the Texas Tribune’s report on the lawsuit, the question of whether a state’s law can trump another state’s law is an open question predating the Civil War.
“Regardless of what the courts in Texas do, the real question is whether the courts in New York recognize it,” Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh professor and a recognized authority on conflicting state laws, told the outlet.
Paxton filed the lawsuit against Dr. Margret Carpenter, who sent abortion pills to a 20-year-old woman living in Collin County, Texas. The woman reportedly took the illegal pills when her unborn child was at the nine-week stage of development, and the pills caused her to experience extreme bleeding. The woman had her child’s father transport her to a hospital for medical attention, though she did not tell him that she was pregnant nor that she was trying to kill their unborn child, according to the court filing.
“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, according to The Guardian.
Paxton’s lawsuit did not specify whether the illegal pills had actually caused an abortion or whether the bleeding caused further health issues. According to The Post Millennial, “Mifepristone and misoprostol, the chemicals found in abortion pills, are reportedly more than 95% effective in producing a miscarriage if taken before the tenth week of pregnancy. Texas abortion law does not criminalize the recipient of the abortion, just the provider.”
The Texas attorney general also petitioned the Collin County court to bar Carpenter from violating Texas law and to force her to compensate the state with $100,000 for each violation of Texas abortion laws. These laws are among the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country, declaring that Texas residents who violate the law could face life in prison and a fine of up to $100,000, while also being stripped of their medical license.
Carpenter, a New York doctor who is not licensed to practice medicine in Texas, is also a pro-abortion activists who founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which is “a national group that assists doctors operating in shield law states to provide abortion counseling and abortion pills to women in states where abortion is illegal,” according to The Post Millennial.
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