By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) – A New York state court clerk 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.
The dispute pits Texas’ restrictive abortion laws against a New York law meant to shield abortion providers from prosecution by other states.
“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,” Acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck said in a statement.
Under New York law, a party can file a motion in New York state court to enforce a judgment in another state, and those motions are typically allowed.
The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Judge Bryan Gantt in Collin County, Texas, entered a default judgment against Dr. Margaret 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 and Rod Nickel)
