PASSAGE OF THE DAY: " A few of the justices in Dobbs saw this coming. Justice Brett Kavanaugh tried to put to rest some of these concerns in his concurrence, explaining that a state could not bar residents from traveling to another state to get an abortion—a question, he said, that was “not especially difficult as a constitutional matter.” But that hasn’t stopped anti-abortion activists from drafting model legislation to do exactly that.
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COMMENTARY: "Anti-Abortion States Are Trying to Enforce a Modern Fugitive Slave Act, by Madiba K. Dennie, published by 'Balls and Strikes' on February 7, 2025. (Madiba K. Dennie is the Deputy Editor and Senior Contributor at Balls & Strikes, and author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take it Back. Her writing has been featured in outlets including The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Balls & Strikes publishes original commentary and reporting about courts, the judges who preside over them, and the legal system they uphold.)
SUB-HEADING: "A Louisiana prosecutor’s decision to indict a New York doctor for mailing abortion pills calls to mind one of the ugliest chapters in this country’s history."
GIST: "Around April 2024, a mom in Port Allen, Louisiana learned that her teenage daughter was pregnant. Because Louisiana bans virtually all abortions, the mom went online and contacted Margaret Carpenter, a family medicine doctor in New Paltz, New York. Carpenter prescribed and mailed medication for the mother to give to her child, who then ended her pregnancy.
Under Louisiana law, knowingly providing a pregnant person with abortion medication is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $50,000 in fines. On January 31, a grand jury in the Parish of West Baton Rouge indicted the minor’s mother, whose name is redacted on the publicly accessible copy of the indictment, as well as Carpenter and her company, Nightingale Medical, for the offense of seeking and providing reproductive healthcare—or, as the statute calls it, “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.”
The girl’s mom turned herself in to the police on Friday, the same day the indictment was issued, and the local prosecutor, Tony Clayton, told the Associated Press that he is waiting for Carpenter to do the same so that she can stand trial. “We expect Dr. Carpenter to come to Louisiana and answer to these charges, and if 12 people think she’s innocent then, let it go,” he said.
Clayton isn’t the first anti-abortion government official to try to use their state’s laws against Carpenter from afar. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a civil suit trying to block Carpenter from providing abortion medication to patients in Texas, seeking to collect at least $100,000 in civil penalties. But the Louisiana case may be the first time since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which rescinded the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, that a state has brought criminal charges against a doctor accused of sending abortion pills to another state.
It is also the first direct test of New York’s shield law, which state lawmakers enacted in 2023 to protect doctors like Carpenter. After Dobbs, Carpenter cofounded Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine so that patients in need can access abortion care regardless of their ZIP code, and ACT has worked with states like New York to strengthen legal protections for providers of these telehealth services. So far, New York politicians are standing by Carpenter: “I will never under any circumstances turn this doctor over to the state of Louisiana under any extradition request,” Governor Kathy Hochul said in a video posted on social media. Attorney General Letitia James also released a statement on Friday, saying, “This cowardly attempt out of Louisiana to weaponize the law against out-of-state providers is unjust and un-American.” There are currently interstate shield laws in 18 states and the District of Columbia, and following the issuance of the warrant for Carpenter’s arrest, New York began further tightening its protections.
The charges against Carpenter were spurred by a state’s refusal to recognize bodily autonomy, and the indictment has put the doctor in the middle of an interstate legal battle, with one state demanding delivery of a person for conduct that is lawful in the other state. This is awfully familiar, and emphasis on the awful: Pre-Civil War disputes over the Fugitive Slave Act, when northern states that enacted “personal liberty laws” refused to return Black people to the slave states from which they escaped, provide the clearest precedent for the conflict over laws that aim to shield abortion patients and providers from other states’ legal clutches. Then and now, people opposed to using their state’s resources to assist in another state’s injustice passed laws that made it harder, costlier, and slower for a less free state to get a person out of a freer one. This is a particularly dark chapter of the country’s history. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs is making the country go through it again.
The federal government attempted to settle the dispute in 1850 by strengthening the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring the return of formerly enslaved people who escaped and penalizing interference with the law’s enforcement. But this backfired, as free states only became bolder: Vermont, for example, passed legislation that effectively nullified the federal law within the state’s borders. When South Carolina seceded in 1860, one of its stated grievances was that free states had interfered with South Carolina’s right of self-government by encouraging enslaved people who sought to escape, and by refusing to deliver Black people back into slavery.
Today’s forced birth extremists discuss telehealth in much the same way. Texas Right to Life President John Seago, for example, recently complained to The Hill that laws that protect telemedicine providers are efforts “to sabotage the governance of their neighboring states.” Erin Hawley, a conservative activist and wife of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, argued that “one state cannot intrude on another state’s efforts to protect the lives and health of its citizens.” (She is referring to fetuses, not pregnant people.)
Anti-abortion officials in Louisiana resent that medication-by-mail allowed more Louisianans to have abortions in 2023 than in 2020, even though the state had enacted a stricter law after the fall of Roe v. Wade. “If it’s legal in New York, keep it up there. Don’t do it down here,” said Clayton in an interview last week. Clayton also suggested that Carpenter would have an “issue” if she “were to travel to a state that has reciprocity with Louisiana.”
A few of the justices in Dobbs saw this coming. Justice Brett Kavanaugh tried to put to rest some of these concerns in his concurrence, explaining that a state could not bar residents from traveling to another state to get an abortion—a question, he said, that was “not especially difficult as a constitutional matter.” But that hasn’t stopped anti-abortion activists from drafting model legislation to do exactly that.
And it doesn’t address the question, raised explicitly by the liberal justices in their joint dissent in Dobbs, of whether a state can interfere with the mailing of drugs used for medication abortions. “The Constitution protects travel and speech and interstate commerce, so today’s ruling will give rise to a host of new constitutional questions,” they wrote. The conservative supermajority, they concluded, had “put the Court at the center of the coming interjurisdictional abortion wars.”
The Supreme Court hasn’t had to answer questions like these in over 150 years. Now it has to answer these questions again. And it only has itself to blame."
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/abortion-pills-indictment-louisiana/
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
