Texas sues New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills via telemedicine

Texas is suing a New York doctor for prescribing mifepristone and misoprostol — the pills utilized for medicine termination — to a Texas nonmigratory via telemedicine, an alleged usurpation of the state’s strict termination law.

Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the suit against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, laminitis of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedecine, successful Collin County civilian tribunal connected Thursday. Carpenter doesn’t look transgression charges, but the authorities is seeking up to a $250,000 fine. 

This is the archetypal clip Texas has sued an out-of-state doc for providing termination services to a Texas diligent via telemedicine. Notably, New York, wherever Carpenter is based, has a “shield law” that’s designed to support doctors who prescribe and nonstop termination pills to patients successful different states, including those that, similar Texas, person outlawed abortion. 

“Regardless of what the courts successful Texas do, the existent question is whether the courts successful New York admit it,” Greer Donley, a prof astatine the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told the Texas Tribune. 

According to the complaint, a 20-year-old pistillate who became large sometime successful mid-May was prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol by Carpenter astatine an undisclosed time. The woman, who is not named successful the lawsuit, experienced adverse broadside effects from the pills and asked her spouse to instrumentality her to the infirmary due to the fact that of hemorrhage oregon terrible bleeding connected July 16th. 

At the hospital, the woman’s spouse was told that she “‘had been’ 9 weeks large earlier losing the child,” the ailment says, which made him reason that she “had intentionally withheld accusation from him regarding her pregnancy, and helium further suspected” that the pistillate “had successful information done thing to lend to the miscarriage oregon abortion” of the pregnancy. According to the complaint, she had not antecedently told her spouse she was pregnant. Upon returning to their home, the woman’s spouse recovered the 2 medications Carpenter allegedly prescribed to the woman. 

The ailment does not accidental erstwhile the pistillate obtained the medication.

Texas has 1 of the strictest termination laws successful the country. The authorities has a near-total prohibition connected termination astatine each stages of pregnancy, with constrictive exceptions if the beingness of the parent is astatine hazard but nary exceptions for cases of rape and incest. According to the complaint, the unnamed 20-year-old pistillate “did not person immoderate life-threatening carnal information aggravated by, caused by, oregon arising from the gestation that placed her astatine hazard of decease oregon immoderate superior hazard of important impairment.”