Last week, a Texas judge ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter — a New York abortion doctor — to pay at least $100,000 in penalties for failing to appear in court. Carpenter has found herself at the center of two major abortion lawsuits: In December, she became the target of the first-ever civil suit against an out-of-state abortion provider, and officials in Louisiana are now also seeking her extradition, with newly appointed US Attorney General Pam Bondi signaling that she’d “love” to get involved.

The mounting legal battles center on whether states with abortion bans can block their constituents from receiving FDA-approved abortion pills from doctors in states with no such restrictions. The cases represent the latest salvo in the fast-evolving fight over reproductive rights in America.

The attacks on Carpenter coincide with new federal threats to abortion medication: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently said he was open to reviewing and potentially reinstating stricter safety requirements on the abortion drug mifepristone — despite it being incredibly safe, as affirmed by decades of patient data from around the world.

Abortion pills have become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to their safety record, their lower cost, and diminished access to in-person care. While states have ramped up abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, access to abortion pills has actually significantly expanded since then, helping to explain why there were more US abortions in 2023 than in any year since 2011.

Reimposing federal restrictions on the drugs could effectively end telemedicine abortion access, in which patients consult with abortion providers remotely, and which thousands of people in states with bans rely on each month for care.

A potent strategy is emerging: revert back to older Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restrictions on mifepristone under the guise of women’s health and safety, while simultaneously supporting states’ attempts to block out-of-state abortion providers. If it works, the anti-abortion movement could achieve many of the same ends as a federal ban without the political backlash.

Maggie Carpenter’s charges underscore an emboldened anti-abortion movement

Carpenter, a family medicine physician from New Paltz, New York, has become a focal point in the ongoing war over abortion access.

In 2022 she co-founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access (ACT) to help enact shield laws in blue states to support providers dispensing abortion pills to patients in red ones. Shield laws protections can include barring state agencies from helping another state’s criminal investigation, and ensuring that an abortion provider does not lose their professional license or face malpractice insurance penalties as a result of an out-of-state complaint. To date, 18 states, including New York, have passed such laws, though Carpenter’s case represents the first real legal test of this shield strategy.

The Texas civil suit filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that........

© Vox