Last Thursday, Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a resident of Texas, where — of course — abortion pills are illegal.
Paxton has said he wants to stop Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, New York, a co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, from mailing abortion pills to Texas and to be allowed to apply Texas’s law to her — which he says allows him to sue her for up to $250,000.
Right now, he only has one case. Over the summer, Dr. Carpenter prescribed and mailed mifepristone and misoprostol to a woman in Texas who made the mistake of asking the man who got her pregnant to take her to the emergency room for “severe bleeding” after taking the cocktail.
Said man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child” and then, when he got home, he found the medications Dr. Carpenter sent her.
It turns out she was pretty smart not to want to give birth to that creep’s kid, because he ended up ratting her out to someone high up enough to get Paxton’s attention. Hopefully, she’ll come forward and out him so that no other woman makes the mistake of sleeping with him ever again.
Thankfully, there are laws protecting Dr. Carpenter. New York, like California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, has shield laws that protect doctors trying to ensure access to these medications in states where abortion is banned. This means that the state will not do what Paxton is hoping for — they will not cooperate with attempts by other states to go after doctors in their own states who provide abortion care and send pills to patients across state lines.
Of course, Paxton already knows this law exists, so he’s likely going to try to get it into federal court and get a federal court to rule the shield laws unconstitutional in some capacity.
One thing that’s concerning, however, and this might not have pricked your radar immediately, is the fact that Donald Trump confirmed yesterday that he is considering privatizing the post office.
“Well there is talk about the Postal Service being taken private, you do know that. Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, it really isn’t,” he said during a press conference in Palm Beach on Monday. “You know it’s a lot different today … between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that, it’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it.”
Now, this is a terrible idea for a number of reasons we could name, but one of them is the fact that part of the reason people in abortion ban states have been able to get abortion pills mailed to them is that the USPS has agreed not to interfere, so long as the Comstock laws don’t get resurrected. A private company, in this instance, could do whatever it wants and could be more easily pressured to do whatever Ken Paxton wants.
There’s also been speculation that Trump will also try to revive the Comstock laws for this purpose, as Project 2025 recommended, despite having said he would not do that. There is absolute no reason to trust him on that, or on anything else.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
