By Jack Queen
(Reuters) – A Texas state judge on Thursday ordered a New York doctor to pay a penalty of at least $100,000 and to stop providing abortion pills to women in the state, in a win for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The case is an early test of conservative states’ power to prosecute doctors outside of their borders and stop abortion medication from reaching their residents, and the ability of states that support abortion rights to shield providers from such prosecutions.
Judge Bryan Gantt in Collin County, Texas, entered a default judgment against New Paltz, New York, doctor Margaret Carpenter after she failed to respond to the state’s civil lawsuit alleging she illegally prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used in medication abortion, to a Texas woman via telemedicine.
Carpenter, a founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, did not enter an appearance in the case and could not be reached for comment.
Carpenter has also been indicted by a Louisiana grand jury for prescribing an abortion pill that was taken by a teenager there, in what appeared to be the first time a state criminally charged a doctor in another state for prescribing abortion drugs.
The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday but has previously said Paxton’s lawsuit puts women in harm’s way by threatening access to safe and effective reproductive healthcare.
Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Medication abortion accounts for more than half of U.S. abortions. It has drawn increasing attention since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision allowing states to ban abortion, which more than 20 states, including Texas, have done.
New York is among the Democratic-led states that have passed so-called shield laws aiming to protect doctors who provide abortion pills to patients in other states. The law says New York will not cooperate with another state’s effort to prosecute, sue or otherwise penalize a doctor for providing the pills, as long as the doctor complies with New York law.
In the lawsuit against Carpenter, which appeared to be the first of its kind, Paxton’s office alleged the doctor violated Texas’s abortion law and its occupational licensing law by practicing medicine in the state despite not being licensed there.
The patient that Carpenter allegedly prescribed the medication to went to the hospital after experiencing bleeding as a complication of taking the drugs, which were subsequently discovered by her partner, according to the lawsuit.
(Reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Additional reporting by Brendan Pierson, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Aurora Ellis)
