Illustration by William Joel
Texas is suing a New York doctor for prescribing mifepristone and misoprostol — the pills used for medication abortion — to a Texas resident via telemedicine, an alleged violation of the state’s strict abortion law.
Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedecine, in Collin County civil court on Thursday. Carpenter doesn’t face criminal charges, but the state is seeking up to a $250,000 fine.
This is the first time Texas has sued an out-of-state doctor for providing abortion services to a Texas patient via telemedicine. Notably, New York, where Carpenter is based, has a “shield law” that’s designed to protect doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in other states, including those that, like Texas, have outlawed abortion.
“Regardless of what the courts in Texas do, the real question is whether the courts in New York recognize it,” Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told the Texas Tribune.
According to the complaint, a 20-year-old woman who became pregnant sometime in mid-May was prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol by Carpenter at an undisclosed time. The woman, who is not named in the lawsuit, experienced adverse side effects from the pills and asked her partner to take her to the hospital because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding on July 16th.
At the hospital, the woman’s partner was told that she “‘had been’ nine weeks pregnant before losing the child,” the complaint says, which made him conclude that she “had intentionally withheld information from him regarding her pregnancy, and he further suspected” that the woman “had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion” of the pregnancy. According to the complaint, she had not previously told her partner she was pregnant. Upon returning to their home, the woman’s partner found the two medications Carpenter allegedly prescribed to the woman.
The complaint does not say when the woman obtained the medication.
Texas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the country. The state has a near-total ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions if the life of the mother is at risk but no exceptions for cases of rape and incest. According to the complaint, the unnamed 20-year-old woman “did not have any life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from the pregnancy that placed her at risk of death or any serious risk of substantial impairment.”