New York refuses to extradite Dr. Margaret Carpenter, reinforcing its telehealth shield law and challenging state abortion bans.
On Feb. 1, an arrest warrant was issued Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New York, following her indictment in Louisiana (as well as the indictment of her practice Nightingale Medical) on felony abortion charges for prescribing and sending abortion pills into the state for use by a pregnant Louisiana teen. A co-founder of Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, Carpenter is also the target of a civil suit brought last month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking monetary damages and a permanent injunction blocking her from sending abortion pills to Texas residents.
If convicted, Carpenter could face up to 15 years in prison, $200,000 in fines and the permanent revocation of her medical license. But New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to yield any ground to this deep red state. As she stressed on social media, she signed New York’s telehealth shield law in order “to protect patients and doctors from exactly this kind of action,” and that she “would never under any circumstances turn [Carpenter] over to the state of Louisiana under any extradition request.”
Louisiana is attempting to prosecute a New York doctor for providing reproductive health care.
— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) January 31, 2025
After Roe was overturned, I signed laws to protect patients & doctors from exactly this type of action.
We will not comply with an extradition request.
We will remain a safe harbor. pic.twitter.com/dZtoDcNGbs
In full accord, New York Attorney General Letitia James stated in a press release, “We will always protect our providers from unjust attempts to punish them for doing their job and we will never cower in the face of intimidation and threats.”
Louisiana District Attorney Tony Clayton, a prosecutor in the case, claimed to be “shocked” that Carpenter was not heading straight to Louisiana to turn herself in to law enforcement, notwithstanding her full compliance with New York’s shield law. Reproaching her, he insisted, “You broke the law in the state of Louisiana and you ought to come down here and answer the charges.”
The actions against Carpenter, which both appear to be cases of first impression, have brought the long-simmering post-Roe border tensions between abortion-hostile and abortion-protective states to a head. These battles were sagely predicted in a seminal 2023 law review article. Rejecting the Supreme Court’s claim that the fall of Roe would quell the national debate over abortion, the authors instead accurately foresaw that “borders and jurisdiction will become the central focus of the abortion battle,” as conservative states attempt to extend abortion bans beyond their own borders, while liberal states push back against this repression.
The Texas and Louisiana cases are a frontal attack on New York’s telehealth abortion shield law. Like the laws in effect in seven other abortion-protective states, it flips the usual rule that the “practice of medicine occurs where the patient is located” and instead defines “legally protected reproductive [healthcare] … as having taken place where the licensed provider is located when they give care from their state.” By making the shield state the site of abortion care, telehealth providers who send abortion pills into ban states are protected from investigations and legal proceedings initiated by abortion-hostile state officials in response to the provision of abortion pills to a resident of their state.
These cases are an integral component of the all-out effort by antiabortion advocates to block the flow of abortion pills into their states. This, of course, comes as no surprise given that medication abortions currently account for approximately two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. Moreover, what feminist geographer Sydney Calkin refers to as the “unruly mobilities” of abortion pills, on account of their ability to “transgress political boundaries,” makes them a particularly potent threat to abortion-ban states.
In an interview with Talk Louisiana, Clayton displayed an undisguised antipathy towards shield law providers who avail themselves of home-state statutory protections to send abortion pills into states intent upon pressing women and girls into unwanted parenthood by way of abortion bans. Flying in the face of evidence-based science, he characterized abortion pills as “poison” and compared sending them across state lines as the equivalent of “shipping fentanyl … that end[s] up in the mouths and stomachs of our minor kids.” He admonished abortion-protective states to keep abortion pills “up there. Don’t do it down here.”
But keeping abortion pills “up there” means that only those who are able to travel from a ban state to one where abortion is legal will be able to exercise their fundamental right to make decisions about their own bodies and futures, albeit often at tremendous personal cost. The availability of pills expands access for those who are unable to undertake cross-border abortion travel, often for reasons such as age, poverty or immigration status.
Reinforcing New York’s pride in being a safe haven for abortion, on Feb. 3, Hochul signed a new bill adding another layer of protection for doctors who prescribe abortion pills. Similar to a Washington state law, doctors can now ask a dispensing pharmacy to list the name of their health care practice on the prescription label in lieu of their own name.
Other telehealth shield law states are likely to follow suit in their continued efforts to ensure conservative states do not control the reproductive destinies of their residents through the imposition of draconian abortion bans.
