The legal battle over the interstate mailing of abortion pills has begun. On Friday, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based OB-GYN and reproductive justice activist, over what he alleges was Carpenter’s choice to mail abortion pills from New York to a 20-year-old pregnant woman in Texas.
The lawsuit, filed in a Texas state court but almost certainly the beginning of a federal legal battle, marks the first formal legal challenge by an anti-abortion attorney general against a Democratic-controlled state’s shield laws, which protect abortion providers from out-of-state liability, and is slated to test how far pro-choice states can go to protect providers within their state borders – and how much force anti-choice states can give to their abortion bans beyond theirs.
