Abortionist Gets Out of Paying Fine for Selling Illegal Abortion Pills in Texas
The face-off between Texas and the state of New York took a giant step forward Thursday, this time involving the acting clerk of Ulster County in Kingston, N.Y.
Taylor Bruck told the New York Times that he would not grant Texas’ motion that sought to enforce the order of State District Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court to New York abortionist Margaret Carpenter “to pay a penalty of $113,000 and to stop sending abortion medication to Texas,” according to Pam Belluck.
In 2024 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Dr. Carpenter, “who mailed abortion pills –mifepristone–to a Texas woman who suffered complications, including bleeding severe enough to warrant emergency care,” Nancy Flanders reported.
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
Last month, in ordering the fine against Carpenter, Judge Gantt noted that, despite being notified, Carpenter failed to appear in court.
Gantt ruled that Carpenter “had violated Texas law by practicing without a license and facilitating an abortion, and ‘that an unborn child died as a result of these violations.’” Gantt “issued a permanent injunction against Carpenter prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents,” Pat Belluck and
Meanwhile, Louisiana, which like Texas has a strongly pro-life law, had requested that Carpenter be arrested and sent to Louisiana. Pro-abortion New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana,” adding 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,” Anthony Izaguirre and Jamie Stengle reported.
“New York is one of eight states that have enacted ‘telemedicine abortion shield laws’ after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022,” Bellock reported. “The laws prevent officials from extraditing abortion providers to other states or from responding to subpoenas and other legal actions — a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in such cases. The action by the New York county clerk is the first time that an abortion shield law has been used.”
According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, “Texas laws prohibit a physician or medical supplier from providing any abortion-inducing drugs by courier, delivery, or mail service. Additionally, no physician may treat patients or prescribe Texas residents medicine through telehealth services unless the doctor holds a valid Texas medical license” which Carpenter does not.
“This is the first case in the nation to hold doctors accountable for unlawfully attempting to push abortion-inducing drugs in a state where they are illegal,” Paxton said. As such, the case could test whether “telemedicine abortion shield laws” enacted by Democratic-controlled legislatures where abortion is legal can immunize abortionists who send mifepristone into states where it is not.
Julie Kay, executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, argues the Texas ruling does not change shield laws and that “patients can access medication abortion from licensed providers no matter where they live.”
Belluck and Gahan provided further background:
According to a complaint filed by the Texas attorney general’s office, the woman, who had been nine weeks pregnant, asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room in July “because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding.” In court on Wednesday, Ernest C. Garcia, chief of the administrative law division in the attorney general’s office, said that at the hospital, the woman’s partner “ended up finding out that she had been pregnant” and that “he then started to suspect that maybe she had not been truthful about it.”
When the man returned to the house, he found the medications and realized that they had been taken to induce an abortion, Mr. Garcia said, adding “that individual then filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office.”
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.