(LifeSiteNews) – Far-left New York Attorney General Letitia James is intervening in Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to prosecute an abortionist for mailing abortion pills from one state to the other to undermine Texas’s pro-life laws.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Paxton first filed his lawsuit against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, founder of the “Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine,” in December 2024 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 Texas. In February 2025, Judge Bryan Gantt of North Texas ordered Carpenter to stop sending abortion pills into the state and to pay a $100,000 fine (Carpenter also faces charges out of Louisiana for the same).
So far, New York officials have protected the abortionist from consequences via the state’s shield law, which bars cooperation with other states concerning laws against abortion. Paxton has challenged the shield law and sued the Ulster County, New York clerk who refused to enforce the fine.
NBC News reported that James, a Democrat, announced this month that her office will defend both the clerk and the shield law, with arguments to be filed by September 19. “I am stepping in to defend the integrity of our laws and our courts against this blatant overreach,” she said. “Texas has no authority in New York, and no power to impose its cruel abortion ban here.”
“Letitia James is a lawless abortionist who is obsessed with killing babies and weaponizing her office for her political career,” Paxton responded. “I will defeat her in court.”
“We’re not going to stop trying to extradite (Carpenter) and prosecute her for the crimes that she’s committing in our state,” Louisiana Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill added.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of abortion pills across state lines has become arguably the abortion lobby’s most effective tactic for preserving abortion “access,” and are particularly problematic in pro-life states, to which they can be sent and taken in complete privacy without any sign law enforcement can act on.
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 “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says 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.” A recent Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear safer than they really are.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” Catholic University of America research associate Michael New wrote. “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.’”
Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.
