A Texas judge on Thursday ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas, a ruling that could test “shield laws” in Democratic-controlled states where abortion is legal.
The ruling was handed down on the same day New York Gov. Kathy Hochul rejected a request from Louisiana to extradite the same doctor, Dr. Maggie Carpenter, who was charged in that state with prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor.
Unlike Louisiana, Texas did not file criminal charges against Carpenter but accused her in a December lawsuit of violating state law by prescribing abortion medication via telemedicine. Texas has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation.
State District Judge Bryan Gantt issued the fine against Carpenter and ordered her to pay attorney’s fees. He also issued an injunction barring Carpenter from prescribing abortion medication to Texas residents. Gantt noted in his order that despite being notified, Carpenter failed to appear in court.
Earlier Hochul, a Democrat, said she would not honor Louisiana’s request to arrest and send the doctor to Louisiana after she was charged with violating the southern state’s strict anti-abortion law.
“I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana,” Hochul said at a news conference in Manhattan. “Not now, not ever.”
She also said she sent out a notice to law enforcement in New York that instructed them to not cooperate with out-of-state warrants for such charges.
Carpenter is co-medical director and founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine. Julie Kay, the group’s executive director, said the Texas ruling does not change shield laws and that “patients can access medication abortion from licensed providers no matter where they live.”
The group also criticized Louisiana’s efforts to extradite Carpenter.
The case against Carpenter in Louisiana appears to be the first instance of criminal charges against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to another state.
Pills have become the most common method of abortion in the U.S. and are at the epicenter of political and legal fights over abortion access following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Both the Texas and Louisiana cases will test New York’s so-called shield law, which gives legal protections to doctors who prescribe abortion medication to conservative states where abortions are banned or otherwise limited. Other Democratic-controlled states have similar “shield laws.”
Prosecutors in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, indicted Carpenter on charges that she violated the state’s near-total abortion ban, which allows physicians convicted of performing abortions, including one with pills, to be sentenced up to 15 years in prison.
Louisiana authorities said the girl who received the pills experienced a medical emergency and had to be transported to the hospital. The girl’s mother was also charged and has turned herself in to police.
In a videotaped statement Thursday, Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said “there is only one right answer in this situation, and it is that that doctor must face extradition to Louisiana where she can stand trial and justice will be served.”
Landry’s office did not immediately return an emailed request for comment sent after Hochul refused the extradition request.
In the Texas case, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has said that the 20-year-old woman who received the pills ended up in a hospital with complications. It was only after that, the state said in its filing, that the man described as “the biological father of the unborn child” learned of the pregnancy and the abortion.
