The Texas attorney general has sued a doctor in New York who prescribed abortion pills
Defending the Biden Administration via Prosecutive Measures around Mifepristone in the U.S. Supreme Court against Adoption of Abortion Pills
Anti-abortion advocates, who legally challenged the Biden administration’s prescribing rules around mifepristone, have been readying provocative and unusual ways to further limit abortion pill access when Trump takes office next year. They feel emboldened to challenge the pills’ use and seek ways to restrict it under a conservative U.S. Supreme Court buttressed by a Republican-controlled Congress and White House.
Also this year, Louisiana became the first state to reclassify the drugs as “controlled dangerous substances.” They can still be prescribed, but there are extra steps required to access them.
“I was starting to wonder if we could provide both deterrents to companies violating the criminal law and remedies for the family of the unborn children”, said the Tennessee state lawmaker.
The Texas woman received a combination of two drugs that are usually used in abortions. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone and primes the uterus to respond to the contraction-causing effect of the second drug, misoprostol. The two-drug regimen can be used to end pregnancies for up to 10 weeks, though the drugs can also help induce labor and treat bleeding in the brain.
Texas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the country. The state has a near-total ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions if the life of the mother is at risk but no exceptions for cases of rape and incest. The complaint says that the unnamed 20-year-old woman didn’t have a life threatening physical condition due to the pregnancies that placed her at risk of death or serious impairment.
Such prescriptions, made online and over the phone, are a key reason that the number of abortions has increased across the U.S. even since state bans started taking effect. Most abortions in the U.S. involve pills.
“We do not want to send pills into the U.S. government, but we do want to do it in the blue states,” a lawyer for the State of Texas
A challenge to shielding laws, which blue states started adopting in this decade, has been anticipated according to a law professor.
“Will doctors be more afraid to mail pills into Texas, even if they might be protected by shield laws because they don’t know if they’re protected by shield laws?” Ziegler said in an interview Friday.
At the hospital, the woman’s partner was told that she “‘had been’ nine weeks pregnant before losing the child,” the complaint says, which made him conclude that she “had intentionally withheld information from him regarding her pregnancy, and he further suspected” that the woman “had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion” of the pregnancy. According to the complaint, she had not previously told her partner she was pregnant. The pills were found by the woman’s partner when they returned to their home.
Paxton said that the 20-year-old woman who received the pills ended up in a hospital with complications. It was only after that, the state said in its filing, that the man described as “the biological father of the unborn child” learned of the pregnancy and the abortion.
It’s unclear how that could be enforced if the case goes to court in Texas. She asked if he was going to New York to enforce it.
Does New York City Recognize the Phone Calling of Dr. Carolyn Carpenter? A Conversation with Dr. J. Kiefer at the University of Pittsburgh
A phone message left for Carpenter was not immediately returned, nor was an email to the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, where she’s co-medical director and founder.
The real question is whether the courts in New York recognize the issue, according to a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Texas, which has one of the strictest abortion laws in the US, has claimed that a 20-year-old woman who was prescribed mifepristone pills ended up in hospital with complications. The woman had received a combination of two drugs that are usually used in abortions. Texas said it didn’t want to send pills into the US government, but it does want to do it in “blue states”.