On Friday, a grand jury in West Baton Rouge, La., returned a felony indictment of New York-based Dr. Margaret Carpenter. Her crime? Providing telehealth abortion services and FDA-approved medications in Louisiana, which in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s shameful overturn of Roe v. Wade is one of the states that has moved to implement a near-total and criminally-enforced abortion ban. This attempt to reach into the sovereign state of New York must be stopped.
If Louisiana or some other state wants to use its newly Supreme Court-granted ability to impose its leaders’ ideological doctrine on its women and girls and strip them of their rights, they are unfortunately free to try to do so. They are not and should not be free, however, to cross state lines and interfere with New York medical professionals performing their duties on behalf of patients, no matter where these patients might happen to be.
To treat these providers as if they were illegal drug dealers when what they are prescribing are legal, safe, effective and FDA-approved therapeutics to facilitate an abortion is wrong, and states like ours should never go along. We cannot reverse this decision to indict, but we certainly do not have to comply with any efforts to prosecute this case.
That was the purpose of the shield laws that Gov. Hochul signed in mid-2023, and which we all knew would sooner or later be brought into play by overzealous out-of-state prosecutors wanting to impose their state’s regressive policies here.
This is the first real test of those laws, and it’s one that New York should easily pass, especially given that all we have to do is nothing: no information sharing, no cooperation and certainly no arrest.
This is imperative not just for the sake of Dr. Carpenter but for the sake of all providers who are helping people in states with heavy prohibitions receive abortion care from a distance. It’s clear that hostile states are trying to make an example out of Carpenter specifically, given that she has also been sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
It must be made clear that we’ll stand behind our doctors and against this overreach or it will never end; they’ll go after more and more providers, and eventually after other New Yorkers that don’t comply with their bad policies.
What’s to stop these states from eventually going after, say, therapists who work with LGBTQ youth that officials claim don’t exist? Or what about service providers who assist undocumented immigrants, which some red-state officials might try to claim are engaged in trafficking or harboring criminals? It’s a slippery slope down that we really don’t want to find the bottom of, and the only way to prevent that is to nip in the bud now.
Louisiana can send all the abortion indictments, warrants and requests for extradition it wants, and we should be standing ready to feed them into a shredder. Beyond that, state leaders like Hochul and Attorney General Tish James should remind New York law enforcement that cooperation is not only discouraged, but is now itself illegal. Especially now with a federal government openly hostile to abortion rights, states like ours must exist as locales of some sanity and personal rights.
