In a case that could have major implications for abortion access in the United States, a Texas judge on Thursday ordered a New York doctor to stop prescribing and sending abortion pills to patients in Texas and to pay a penalty of more than $100,000 for providing the medication to one woman.
The case is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court and become a pivotal test in the escalating battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights. It essentially pits Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a “telemedicine abortion shield law” intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.
These shield laws have become a key abortion rights strategy since the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in 2022. The laws, enacted in eight states so far, stipulate that officials and agencies will not cooperate with civil suits, prosecutions or other legal actions filed against health care providers who prescribe and send abortion medication to patients in other states.
Such laws represent a stark departure from typical interstate practices of extraditing, honoring subpoenas and sharing information. Under telemedicine abortion shield laws, which have been in use since summer 2023, health care providers in states where abortion is legal have been sending more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions.
The Texas lawsuit was filed in December by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., who works with telemedicine abortion organizations to provide pills to patients across the country. The suit alleges that Dr. Carpenter, who is not licensed in Texas, supplied abortion pills to a woman in Texas.
The order signed on Thursday by Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court said that Dr. Carpenter “is permanently enjoined from prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents.” Violating an injunction can result in a contempt order from a judge, which could carry additional financial penalties or a jail sentence. The judge also ordered a $100,000 fine and about $13,000 in attorneys’ fees and court costs plus interest.
With New York’s shield law prohibiting cooperation with out-of-state legal actions, Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers did not respond to the Texas suit or appear in court on Wednesday for a hearing before the judge.
The 40-minute session in the court north of Dallas was notably quiet and sedate for an issue of such controversy and national significance.
Two lawyers for the attorney general’s office asked the judge to issue a default judgment in their favor, essentially a ruling against a defendant who has not shown up or provided any response.
The attorney general’s lawyers argued in court filings that because Dr. Carpenter did not respond within a certain period of time, Texas law deems that “defendant by her non-answer has admitted all of the plaintiffs’ allegations of fact establishing liability.”
The defense table was empty. About 30 minutes into the hearing, Judge Gantt said, “I noticed she is not here.” He asked the attorney general’s lawyers if they had heard from Dr. Carpenter that morning.
When they said no, the judge asked the bailiff to “call the hall” and announce Dr. Carpenter’s name in the corridor outside the courtroom. Less than a minute later, the bailiff returned and said, “Your honor, I called Margaret Daley Carpenter three times with no response.”
Texas was the first state with an abortion ban to initiate legal action against abortion providers in states with shield laws. But other states with abortion bans are expected to follow suit.
In January, the first criminal charges against a shield-law abortion provider were filed. In that case, a state grand jury in Louisiana issued a criminal indictment, also against Dr. Carpenter, accusing her of violating Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban by sending pills to that state.
On Thursday, Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, said he had signed a warrant seeking to extradite Dr. Carpenter to his state to stand trial. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, responded by citing the state’s shield law and saying, “I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana, not now, not ever.”
The Texas and Louisiana cases are each expected to lead to court battles with the state of New York.
New York’s refusal could lead Louisiana to ask the federal courts to order extradition, experts said. The potential outcome is unclear, but Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion expert at the University of California, Davis, said there was legal precedent for extradition not being required for defendants who were not in the state where the alleged crime was committed and did not flee from that state.
In the civil case, Texas is considered likely to file a petition in a state court in New York to try to collect the financial penalty. If New York were to cite its shield law to argue against the Texas penalty, as expected, the case could transform into a battle in federal court or the Supreme Court over whether the shield law is constitutional in allowing one state to refuse to cooperate with another state’s legal actions.
Dr. Carpenter has not been reachable for comment about either the Texas or Louisiana case. The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization she co-founded, has issued statements in response to the cases. “Shield laws are essential in safeguarding and enabling abortion care regardless of a patient’s ZIP code or ability to pay,” the coalition has said. “They are fundamental to ensuring everyone can access reproductive health care as a human right.”
The Texas lawsuit accuses Dr. Carpenter of providing a 20-year-old woman with the two medications used in a standard abortion regimen, mifepristone and misoprostol. Typically used up through 12 weeks into pregnancy, mifepristone blocks a hormone needed for pregnancies to develop, and misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes contractions similar to a miscarriage.
According to a complaint filed by the Texas attorney general’s office, the woman, who had been nine weeks pregnant, asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room in July “because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding.” In court on Wednesday, Ernest C. Garcia, chief of the administrative law division in the attorney general’s office, said that at the hospital, the woman’s partner “ended up finding out that she had been pregnant” and that “he then started to suspect that maybe she had not been truthful about it.”
When the man returned to the house, he found the medications and realized that they had been taken to induce an abortion, Mr. Garcia said, adding “that individual then filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office.”
The Texas case is an example of an increasing pattern in states with abortion bans: men reporting to the authorities that their female partners had abortions. There have been other such cases in Texas, and John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, said in an interview that, in the coming weeks, several men plan to file suits for wrongful death against doctors, organizations or people who assisted in arranging abortions for the men’s female partners.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
