Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the once-indicted and once-impeached attack dog for right-wing causes, is trying to use the courts to impose his state’s harsh abortion limits elsewhere with his specious state lawsuit against New Paltz Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter for prescribing and sending abortion medications to a woman in Texas. He needs to lose this case.
Paxton’s suit conflicts with New York law, which shields doctors from out-of-state prosecution and civil action for actions that are legal in New York. The case is likely to end up in federal court, where it will shape how abortion care — which is now mainly conducted through these medications — can continue nationwide.
Paxton’s contention is at least in part that Carpenter is practicing medicine in Texas, but she’s obviously not. She is licensed by and practicing here, and the act of having sent a prescription for a legal drug does not change that. This is an attempt by Texas to simply impose its laws on New York and put our doctors at risk for engaging in their profession, plus sending a chilling message to medical practitioners around the country.
It’s worth noting, of course, that even the Supreme Court’s tortured logic in its politicized overturning of Roe v. Wade, it purported to want to leave this question to state determinations. New York permits abortions, and it permits our doctors to provide this care to women who need it.
But having state, rather federal, oversight was never really the goal of the anti-abortion movement. They want abortion banned, everywhere. They want to extend Texas law into New York and other states, so the lowest common denominator state’s laws to be controlling nationwide. That’s evident not just by this effort but by efforts to have interstate travel for the purposes of obtaining abortion care also be prohibited, and the people involved criminally prosecuted.
States do, of course, get to make their own laws, some of which impact what people can and can’t do elsewhere. You cannot, for example, purchase legal marijuana in another state and have it shipped to yours, where is it not permitted. In that case, however, we’re talking about what is still a federally banned drug that can’t be sent in the mail. However, the abortion drugs at issue have long been FDA approved and are legal in every state, including Texas.
Without safe abortion access, the alternative, as it’s always been, is that women and girls will either not get the care they need and suffer the potential for complications and be forced to carry pregnancies to term, or else attempt to secure abortions that are much less safe for all involved. Paxton and his allies seem much less concerned about the actual health of the women involved than they do with the ideological principle of abortion restriction.
In the age of telemedicine, what else could be prohibited in such a manner? Do states get to decide that certain types of counseling — for example, counseling that specifically serves LGBTQ youth — is unlawful under state law and bar people from receiving it in-state, even if their provider is elsewhere? This is a slippery road that can have repercussions on the practice of medicine around the country. Let’s hope the judges agree.
