Letitia James, New York’s Democratic attorney general, has formally announced her intention to intervene in a Texas attempt to penalize a New York doctor accused of mailing abortion pills across state lines, escalating one of the most consequential fights in the US abortion wars.
The move on Monday tees up a showdown between states that ban abortion and those that protect it – one that, legal experts say, challenges fundamental constitutional issues and will probably end up in front of the US supreme court.
The Republican Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, first sued the doctor, Margaret Carpenter, late last year, accusing her of violating Texas’s near-total abortion ban by shipping pills to a Texas woman. After Carpenter failed to turn up for a court appearance, a Texas judge ordered her to pay more than $100,000 in fines.
However, an acting New York clerk in Ulster county refused to enforce the fine against Carpenter, as New York has a “shield law” that forbids state officials from extraditing abortion providers to other states or complying with out-of-state court orders such as the one issued in Texas. Paxton then sued that clerk, Taylor Bruck.
On Monday, James formally notified an Ulster county supreme court judge that she will intervene in Paxton’s lawsuit. She is set to file briefs in court later this month that will argue that Texas cannot use New York courts to enforce its abortion laws.
“I am stepping in to defend the integrity of our laws and our courts against this blatant overreach,” James said in a statement. “Texas has no authority in New York, and no power to impose its cruel abortion ban here.”
Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The outcome of the landmark case between Texas and New York will reverberate across the country, as abortion pills and shield laws have become increasingly vital to US abortion provision in the three years since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. By the end of 2024, providers who live in the handful of blue states with shield laws were mailing more than 10,000 abortion pills a month to people who live in states that ban virtually all abortions or prohibit abortion via telemedicine, according to data from the research project #WeCount.
Incensed by this development, anti-abortion activists have launched numerous legal and legislative broadsides against abortion pills. Jonathan Mitchell, a prominent anti-abortion lawyer in Texas, has represented multiple plaintiffs suing abortion providers for allegedly facilitating abortions. Last week, the Texas state legislature passed a law that lets people sue abortion pill providers who are suspected of mailing the pills to Texas.
The following day, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, suggested that the US government would curb access to a key abortion pill.
Many of these efforts raise fundamental questions about the relationship between US states and their obligations to respect each other’s laws. The closest parallel to the fight over shield laws, experts have noted, are the pre-civil war battles between states over how to treat enslaved people who had escaped slaveholding states and fled into states that banned the practice.
