Texas AG sues New York doctor for providing abortion pills across state lines

(The Hill) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against a New York doctor alleging she violated state law by prescribing abortion medication to Texans via telehealth appointments.

Both surgical and medication abortions are banned in Texas, and Friday’s lawsuit is the first legal test to see what happens when state abortion laws conflict with one another.  

New York, like many other Democratic-leaning states, has a shield law in place protecting providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions if they prescribe or send abortion medication to people living in states with abortion restrictions.   

In the lawsuit, Paxton accuses Margaret Daley Carpenter, a physician and co-founder of The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT) in New York, of prescribing and mailing abortion medication in a telehealth appointment to a 20-year-old pregnant woman in Collin County, Texas, which then later caused “an adverse event” resulting in a medical abortion.  

ACT is an advocacy group founded after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and connects people looking for abortion care to clinicians licensed in states where telemedicine abortion providers are protected under the law, according to the organization’s website.  

ACT has yet to respond to a request for comment from The Hill regarding the lawsuit.  

Carpenter also works with AidAccess and Hey Jane, which provide abortion care, birth control and emergency contraception via telehealth. 

Carpenter’s 20-year-old patient was sent two boxes of abortion medications along with instructions after a telehealth visit this past spring, according to the lawsuit.  

Two drugs are typically used for medication abortions, mifepristone, which stops the pregnancy from advancing, and misoprostol, which induces cramping and bleeding to empty the uterus. 

The first was a box containing 200 mg of mifepristone with “#1” written on it accompanied by directions to take one tablet by mouth. The second was a bottle of misoprostol 200 mcg pills with directions to take four tables after taking the mifepristone pill.  

In July, the patient started to bleed heavily and asked “the biological father of her unborn child” to be taken to the hospital, according to the lawsuit.  After the woman received medical care at a hospital in Collin County, "the biological father of the unborn child was told the mother of the unborn child was experiencing a hemorrhage or heavy bleeding as she ‘had been’ nine weeks pregnant,” the lawsuit reads. 

The lawsuit does not say whether the abortion was successful or what health consequences she suffered after undergoing a medication abortion. 

Paxton is seeking an injunction to stop Carpenter from continuing to provide abortion care via telehealth to Texas and for her to pay $100,000 for every violation of the state’s near-total abortion ban.  

In response to the lawsuit, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that the state will always protect abortion providers from “unjust attempts” to punish them for doing their job.  

“Abortion is, and will continue to be, legal and protected in New York,” she said. “We will never cower in the face of intimidation or threats.”