(LifeSiteNews) — Judge Bryan Gantt of North Texas has ordered New York abortionist Margaret Daley Carpenter to stop sending abortion pills into the state and to pay a $100,000 fine, challenging the abortion lobby’s strategy of circumventing pro-life laws by mailing abortion pills across state lines.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Carpenter, founder of the “Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine,” in December for having “unlawfully provided a Collin County resident with abortion-inducing drugs that ended the life of an unborn child and resulted in serious complications for the mother, who then required medical intervention.” She is not licensed to practice medicine in the state of Texas.
The Austin-American Statesman reports that Gantt has ruled against Carpenter, noting that she “failed to file any answer or responsive pleading” to Paxton’s lawsuit despite repeated notifications, forcing the court to accept the claims against her as factual. It is the first judgment against a specific individual under Texas’s HB 1280 abortion law and a test case for “shield laws” purporting to exempt abortionists in pro-abortion states from violating the laws of pro-life ones.
“Radical out-of-state doctors will not be allowed to peddle dangerous and illegal drugs in Texas to kill unborn babies,” Paxton declared following the ruling. “Any doctor attempting to do so will be punished to the full extent of the law.” Carpenter has yet to respond.
Thirteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
Among those tactics, easy access to and interstate distribution of abortion pills is one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tools for perpetuating abortion-on-demand post-Roe v. Wade, which they are aggressively pursuing regardless of the risks to the women they purport to be serving.
A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says that the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
Pro-lifers warn that with the Biden administration having completely eliminated requirements that abortion pills be taken in the presence of a medical professional, meaning without any medical supervision or medical support close by, those events are certain to increase.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged,” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone that “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
Whether the issue will be resolved manually remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but he said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. In what pro-lifers hope might signal the beginning of a reversal on that position, new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this week that Trump has asked him to study the dangers of abortifacient drugs.