By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -A county official in New York on Monday rejected for a second time efforts by Texas to enforce a $100,000 judgment against a New York doctor accused of violating Texas’ ban on abortion by sending abortion pills to the state, further escalating an unprecedented interstate conflict.
Acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck in a letter to the office of Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doubled down on his March finding that New York’s so-called shield law precludes the enforcement of other states’ abortion bans against New Yorkers.
Paxton’s office last week had asked Bruck to reconsider, arguing that he had a legal duty to enforce the judgment against New Paltz, New York-based doctor Margaret Carpenter. Bruck on Monday said Paxton’s office had not presented any new information.
“While I’m not entirely sure how things work in Texas, here in New York, a rejection means the matter is closed,” wrote Bruck, who is running for county clerk as a Democrat.
Paxton’s office and the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, a group co-founded by Carpenter, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who championed the passage of the shield law earlier this year, praised Bruck for “defending the freedom generations of women fought to secure.”
“Our response to (Texas’) baseless claim is clear: no way in hell. New York won’t be bullied,” Hochul said in a statement.
Medication abortion accounts for more than half of U.S. abortions. It has drawn increasing attention since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision allowing states to ban abortion, which more than 20 states, including Texas, have done.
A judge in Collin County, Texas, entered a default judgment against Carpenter in February after she failed to respond to the state’s civil lawsuit alleging she illegally prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used in medication abortion, to a Texas woman via telemedicine.
Carpenter has also been indicted by a Louisiana grand jury for prescribing an abortion pill that was taken by a teenager there, in what appeared to be the first time a state criminally charged a doctor in another state for prescribing abortion drugs. Hochul in February rejected Louisiana’s request to extradite Carpenter there.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
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