Texas has sued a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas, launching one of the first challenges in the United States to protect laws that Democratic-controlled states passed to protect doctors after Roe v. Wade was overruled.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Thursday in Collin County, and it was announced Friday.
These prescriptions, made online and over the phone, are one of the key reasons that the number of abortions have increased in the US even since state bans began to take effect. the majority abortions in the US involve pills rather than procedures.
Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said a challenge was anticipated to protect the laws, which blue states began adopting in 2023.
And it could have a chilling effect on recipes.
“Will doctors be more afraid to send pills to Texas even though they may be protected by shield laws because they don’t know if they are protected by shield laws?” he said in an interview on Friday.
The lawsuit accuses New York doctor Margaret Daley Carpenter of violating Texas law by providing the drugs to a Texas patient and seeks up to $250,000. There are no criminal charges.
Texas prohibits abortion at all stages of pregnancy and has been one of the most aggressive states in the fight against abortion rights. It started enforcing a state law in 2021, even earlier The US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to state bans, which banned nearly all abortions by allowing citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or helps someone obtain one.
Paxton said the 20-year-old woman who was given the pills… mifepristone and misoprostol, which are typically used in medication abortions, ended up in a hospital with complications. It was only after that, the state said in its filing, that the man described as “the child’s biological father” learned of the pregnancy and the abortion.
“In Texas, we value the health and lives of mothers and babies, and that’s why out-of-state doctors can’t illegally and dangerously prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents Paxton said in a statement.
A phone message left for Carpenter was not immediately returned, nor was an email to the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, where she is the comedic director and founder.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that the state will “protect our providers from unfair attempts to punish them for doing their jobs.”
“Abortion is, and will continue to be, legal and protected in New York. As other states move to crack down on those who provide or obtain abortion care, New York is proud to be a safe haven for the access to abortion,” he said in the statement. .
Abortion advocates, who legally challenged the Biden administration’s prescription rules around mifepristone, have been preparing provocative and unusual ways to further limit Access to the abortion pill when Trump takes office next year They feel emboldened to challenge pill use and seek ways to restrict it under a conservative U.S. Supreme Court backed by a Republican-controlled Congress and White House.
At the beginning of the year, the It was ruled by the US Supreme Court that a group of anti-abortion doctors and their organizations lacked the legal standing to sue to try to get the US Food and Drug Administration to overturn the approval of mifepristone. But since then, Republican state attorneys general in Idaho, Kansas and Missouri have tried to tighten some of the rules around the pills, including a ban on telemedicine prescriptions.
Also this year, Louisiana became the first state to do so reclassify drugs as “controlled dangerous substances”. They can still be prescribed, but there are additional steps required to access them.
Lawmakers in at least three states have introduced bills next year aimed at banning or restricting the use of the pills.
“I started thinking about how we could provide an additional deterrent to companies that violate criminal law and provide a remedy for the family of unborn children,” said Tennessee state Rep. Gino Bulso, who is sponsoring the legislation there. . which includes a provision prohibiting the use of abortion drugs.