Texas’ abortion pill lawsuit against New York doctor marks new challenge to interstate telemedicine
Texas has charged a New York doctor with prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas. This launches one of the first challenges in the US to protect laws that Democratic-controlled states passed to protect doctors after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Thursday in Collin County, and it was announced Friday.
Such prescriptions, provided online and over the phone, are a major reason abortion rates have increased in the U.S. even since state bans went into effect. Most 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 is expected to protect laws that blue states began passing in 2023.
And it can have a chilling effect on the 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?” she said in an interview on Friday.
The lawsuit accuses New York Dr. 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 bans abortion at all stages of pregnancy and has been one of the most aggressive states in rolling back abortion rights. It started in 2021 by enforcing a state law — even before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to state bans — that banned nearly all abortions by allowing citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or anyone helps in obtaining it.
Paxton said the 20-year-old woman who received the pills — mifepristone and misoprostol, which are commonly used in medication abortions — ended up in a hospital with complications. Only then, the state said in its filing, did the man described as “the biological father of the unborn child” learn of the pregnancy and abortion.
“In Texas, we cherish the health and lives of mothers and babies, and this is why out-of-state physicians are not allowed to 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 co-medical director and founder.
Anti-abortion advocates, who are legally challenging the Biden administration’s prescribing rules around mifepristone, have prepared provocative and unusual ways to further restrict access to abortion pills when Trump comes to power next year. They feel emboldened to challenge the use of the pills and seek ways to curb it under a conservative U.S. Supreme Court backed by a Republican-controlled Congress and a White House.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a group of anti-abortion doctors and their organizations lacked the legal standing to file a lawsuit in an effort to revoke the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone. But since then, Republican attorneys general from Idaho, Kansas and Missouri have tried to tighten some regulations around the pills, including banning telemedicine prescribing.
Also this year, Louisiana became the first state to reclassify the drugs as “controlled dangerous substances.” They can still be prescribed, but additional steps are required to access them.
Lawmakers in at least three states have introduced bills for next year aimed at banning or restricting use of the pills.
“I started thinking about how we can provide an additional deterrent to companies that violate criminal law and a solution for the families of the unborn children,” said Tennessee state Rep. Gino Bulso, who is sponsoring the legislation there. that includes a provision banning the use of the drugs for abortion.
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AP reporters Amanda Seitz and Kimberlee Kruesi contributed to this article.