By SEAN MURPHY, MICHAEL HILL and GEOFF MULVIHILL
Texas has sued a New York physician for prescribing abortion tablets to a lady close to Dallas, launching one of many first challenges within the U.S. to defend legal guidelines that Democrat-controlled states handed to guard physicians after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Texas Lawyer Basic Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit on Thursday in Collin County, and it was introduced Friday.
Such prescriptions, made on-line and over the cellphone, are a key cause that the variety of abortions has elevated throughout the U.S. even since state bans began taking impact. Most abortions within the U.S. contain tablets moderately than procedures.
Mary Ruth Ziegler, a legislation professor on the College of California, Davis, Faculty of Legislation, stated a problem to defend legal guidelines, which blue states began adopting in 2023, has been anticipated.
And it may have a chilling impact on prescriptions.
“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?” she stated in an interview Friday.
The lawsuit accuses New York Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of violating Texas legislation by offering the medicine to a Texas affected person and seeks as much as $250,000. No legal expenses are concerned.
Texas bars abortion in any respect levels of being pregnant and has been some of the aggressive states at pushing again towards abortion rights. It started imposing a state legislation in 2021 — even earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to state bans — that barred almost all abortions by permitting residents to sue anybody who offers an abortion or assists somebody in acquiring one.
Paxton stated that the 20-year-old girl who obtained the tablets — mifepristone and misoprostol, that are sometimes utilized in medicine abortions — ended up in a hospital with issues. It was solely after that, the state stated in its submitting, that the person described as “the biological father of the unborn child” discovered of the being pregnant and the abortion.
“In Texas, we treasure the health and lives of mothers and babies, and this is why out-of-state doctors may not illegally and dangerously prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents,” Paxton stated in a press release.
Anti-abortion advocates, who legally challenged the Biden administration’s prescribing guidelines round mifepristone, have been readying provocative and weird methods to additional restrict abortion capsule entry when Trump takes workplace subsequent 12 months. They really feel emboldened to problem the tablets’ use and search methods to limit it beneath a conservative U.S. Supreme Court docket buttressed by a Republican-controlled Congress and White Home.
Earlier this 12 months, the U.S. Supreme Court docket dominated {that a} group of anti-abortion medical doctors and their organizations lacked the authorized standing to sue to attempt to have the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone rescinded. However since then, the Republican state attorneys basic from Idaho, Kansas and Missouri have sought to have among the guidelines across the tablets tightened — together with to bar telemedicine prescriptions.
Additionally this 12 months, Louisiana grew to become the primary state to reclassify the medicine as “controlled dangerous substances.” They’ll nonetheless be prescribed, however there are additional steps required to entry them.
Lawmakers in at the very least three states have launched payments for subsequent 12 months aimed toward barring or limiting use of the tablets.
“I began to think about how we might be able to both provide an additional deterrent to companies violating the criminal law and provide a remedy for the family of the unborn children,” stated Tennessee state Rep. Gino Bulso, who’s sponsoring the laws there that features a provision barring use of the medicines for abortion.
AP reporters Amanda Seitz and Kimberlee Kruesi contributed to this text.
Initially Printed: December 13, 2024 at 2:41 PM EST
