( The Hill ) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against a New York doctor alleging she violated state law by prescribing abortion medication to Texans via telehealth appointments.
Both surgical and medication abortions are banned in Texas, and Friday’s lawsuit is the first legal test to see what happens when state abortion laws conflict with one another.
New York, like many other Democratic-leaning states, has a shield law in place protecting providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions if they prescribe or send abortion medication to people living in states with abortion restrictions.
In the lawsuit, Paxton accuses Margaret Daley Carpenter, a physician and co-founder of The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT) in New York, of prescribing and mailing abortion medication in a telehealth appointment to a 20-year-old pregnant woman in Collin County, Texas, which then later caused “an adverse event” resulting in a medical abortion.
ACT is an advocacy group founded after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and connects people looking for abortion care to clinicians licensed in states where telemedicine abortion providers are protected under the law, according to the organization’s website .