The national abortion battle is moving to a new front, and it’s one that stretches across state lines.
A telemedicine abortion provider in New York has thrust the state’s abortion shield law into the spotlight, setting the stage for an unprecedented state-against-state clash on one of the nation’s most divisive issues.
Dr. Maggie Carpenter of New Paltz, New York, was fined in Texas and charged in Louisiana for providing abortion pills to patients in the two states, where the procedure is all but banned.
Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County, Texas, ordered Carpenter to pay $100,000 in penalties, plus attorney’s fees, for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas in violation of Texas law. He also barred the doctor from prescribing abortion medication to future Texas patients.
The Feb. 13 ruling was made just two days after Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a warrant for Carpenter’s arrest and extradition to his state to stand trial for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor.
Landry said in a video message that the minor in question was “excited to have a baby” and was planning a gender reveal party.
“Her mom conspired with a New York doctor to get the chemical abortion pill in the mail and then forced that minor to take it,” the governor said.
Landry contended that Carpenter must be extradited to Louisiana to face justice, but New York Gov. Kathy Hochul instructed law enforcement in her state not to enforce the extradition. She said New York enacted its various shield laws with situations such as Carpenter’s in mind.
“Doctors take an oath to protect their patients. I took an oath to protect all New Yorkers. So let me be clear: I will not sign Louisiana’s extradition order—not now, not ever,” Hochul wrote on social media platform X.
The first-of-its-kind stalemate raises novel legal questions, from how states can enforce their abortion laws against out-of-state violators, to the wider ramifications of shield laws on interstate relations.
An Emerging Battleground
New York law forbids the extradition of abortion providers who performed an abortion or provided a patient with abortion medication while the provider is physically in New York.
In other words, the state has given in-state telehealth abortion providers permission to prescribe abortion pills to patients in states where the procedure is restricted or banned without fear of retribution at home.
Carpenter, a family medicine provider, is also a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), an advocacy group that worked to pass New York’s shield law and called for similar laws across the country.
Responding to Landry’s extradition order in a statement, ACT noted that Louisiana officials’ attempts to restrict abortion in their state “are inconsistent with” New York law.
“ACT has and continues to stand behind New York and other shield laws across the country that enable the distribution of safe and effective telemedicine abortion care,” the group added.
Obtaining a prescription for abortion pills via telemedicine is a relatively new concept. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, federal regulations required patients to see an abortion provider in person to obtain the first of two drugs in the medication abortion regimen, mifepristone and misoprostol. In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revised that rule to allow the delivery of abortion pills by mail.
Erik Baptist, senior counsel and director of the Center for Life at Alliance Defending Freedom, said the rise of abortion shield laws and their associated legal complications was “the logical and inevitable outgrowth” of that decision.
“Now, you have a state such as New York authorizing its prescribers and doctors in the state to provide abortion drugs across state lines and … knowingly into states that have pro-life laws and protections, such as Texas, in violation of their laws,” Baptist told The Epoch Times.
Abortion is illegal at all stages of pregnancy in Louisiana except when the procedure is performed to save the life of the mother. Penalties for violating the law range from $5,000 to $50,000 in fines and one to five years in prison.
Texas has similarly banned abortion in all cases save those that pose a serious threat to the mother’s life or health. Yet the Lone Star state did not level criminal charges against Carpenter, opting to sue her instead.
Both cases nonetheless raise the same questions: Which state’s law reigns supreme and how can it be enforced?
“Will that provider pay those penalties? Or when they try to serve and obtain those penalties out-of-state, such as in the state of New York, what will that provider do and how will they defend it? Will they hide behind New York’s shield law?” Baptist asked.
Constitutional Questions
Mary Ziegler, professor at the University of California Davis School of Law, said the answers to such questions may not be black and white—particularly in the Louisiana case, which involves extradition.
“There’s more gray area, traditionally, with extradition,” Ziegler told The Epoch Times.
According to the U.S. Constitution’s Interstate Extradition Clause: “A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.”
Ziegler noted that, on its face, the law appears to apply to those who commit a crime in one state and then flee to another to avoid prosecution.
“The tricky thing for Louisiana in this situation is that the doctor never set foot in Louisiana, right? She mailed the pills from New York, so this is not a classic fugitive situation,” she said.
Louisiana could argue the situation calls for an updated interpretation of the clause, “but they would be arguing for a change, I think, not the status quo,” Ziegler said.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has not filed a federal lawsuit against New York yet, though her press secretary, Lester Duhé, hinted that one could be in the works.
“Stay tuned!” Duhé told The Epoch Times in an email.
Another relevant section of the Constitution is the Full Faith and Credit Clause, which dictates that states give “full faith and credit” to every other state’s “public acts, records, and judicial proceedings.”
Ziegler said the provision, traditionally applied to civil matters, could come into play if Carpenter chooses to appeal the Texas ruling.
“There, you have a final judgment that a Texas court reached against the doctor, and the question is going to be if Texas can compel a New York court to honor that judgment. And that’s going to turn on the meaning of the Full Faith and Credit Clause,” she said.
Ziegler added that she fully expects additional litigation to ensue not only in Carpenter’s case but in others as similar situations arise.
“This is kind of just going to be the tip of the iceberg,” she said.
Future Implications
Twenty-one other states and the District of Columbia have abortion shield laws in place to protect residents from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, though New York’s law is the first to be tested.
Whatever the final judgments are, the unprecedented cases could have wider implications for not only the national abortion debate but also interstate relations.
“This is one of the first times that we’re seeing a group of states actively say, ‘Not only do I not think that Texas and other pro-life states can have the laws that they want to have, but I’m going to actively prevent them from enforcing their laws,’” said Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision sent the matter of abortion back to the states to legislate, Daniel said shield laws could push the issue back onto the federal stage.
“When pro-abortion, Democrat-run states started passing these so-called shield laws, they rejected the idea of a states-only, federalism-oriented approach because they said: ‘We will allow people to sit in our states and break Texas and Florida and Louisiana laws,’” she said.
President Donald Trump has said he believes abortion should remain a states’ rights issue. That position could mean the Justice Department stays out of the fray. But Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said it’s only a matter of time before the federal government is forced to pick a side.
“There’s going to be a constitutional crisis … on this at some point,” Hawkins told The Epoch Times.
She noted that the Comstock Act prohibits the mailing of abortion pills anywhere in the country, not just across state lines. The 1873 obscenity law bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” materials, including any substance, drug, or device meant to produce or procure an abortion.
Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department interpreted the Comstock Act to exclude the mailing of abortion drugs where the sender “lacks the intent” for them to be used unlawfully. Hawkins said that interpretation posed a clear violation of the law—a position that Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas hinted last year that they may be amenable to.
As for shield laws, Hawkins described the lack of interstate cooperation on abortion law enforcement as “a huge, huge problem.”
“States follow other states’ laws all the time when it comes to child custody, business deals, banking,” she noted. “You can’t just be picking and choosing the laws that you like in the state or don’t like.”
Baptist, meanwhile, said such laws are likely to damage the ties that bind the nation together.
States are “the incubators of democracy, where they’re supposed to have a patchwork of laws, in many ways, to meet the will of their people through their elected representatives,” he said.
“By undermining your neighboring states or across the country, it is defeating how our country has been set up historically.”
Baptist said he believes the best path forward would be for the federal government to reverse its decision that allows delivery of the abortion pill by mail. Ultimately, however, he thinks at least one of Carpenter’s cases will end up before the nation’s high court.
“But you can never predict how the U.S. Supreme Court is going to rule.”