By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) -A local official in New York on Thursday rejected Texas’ effort to enforce a $100,000 judgment against a New York doctor accused of sending abortion pills to the state, escalating an unprecedented interstate conflict.
Acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck said in a statement that he would not allow Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to file a motion to enforce the judgment in New York court, in what appeared to be the first use of New York’s so-called shield law meant to protect New Yorkers from enforcement under other states’ abortion laws.
“I commend the Ulster County Clerk for doing what is right,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement, adding that “we will not allow anyone to undermine health care providers’ ability to deliver necessary care to their patients.”
The doctor, Margaret Carpenter, and Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization she helped found, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Judge Bryan Gantt in Collin County, Texas, entered a default judgment against Carpenter, of New Paltz, New York, last month after she failed to respond to the state’s civil lawsuit alleging she illegally prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used in medication abortion, to a Texas woman via telemedicine. Telemedicine is a means of providing healthcare remotely.
Medication abortion accounts for more than half of U.S. abortions. It has drawn increasing attention since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision allowing states to ban abortion, which more than 20 states, including Texas, have done.
New York is among the Democratic-led states that have passed so-called shield laws to protect doctors who provide abortion pills to patients in other states. The law says New York will not cooperate with another state’s effort to prosecute, sue or otherwise penalize a doctor for providing the pills, as long as the doctor complies with New York law.
Paxton’s office alleged that Carpenter violated Texas’ abortion law and its occupational licensing law by practicing medicine in the state despite not being licensed there.
He said the patient to whom Carpenter prescribed the medication went to a hospital after experiencing bleeding as a complication of taking the drugs, which were subsequently discovered by her partner.
Carpenter has also been indicted by a Louisiana grand jury for prescribing an abortion pill that was taken by a teenager there, in what appeared to be the first time a state criminally charged a doctor in another state for prescribing abortion drugs.
(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Rod Nickel and Diane Craft)
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