Louisiana’s attorney general is seeking to extradite a New York doctor who prescribed and sent abortion medication through the mail to a resident of the Pelican State, escalating a legal battle surrounding the doctor that could test the limits of state abortion shield laws.
The doctor, Margaret Carpenter, faces allegations from both Texas and Louisiana that she violated their laws by helping state residents get abortion pills. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued Carpenter in December for allegedly prescribing and sending abortion medication to a woman in the state last year, and a grand jury in Louisiana indicted her for the same reason last month, prompting state Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) to request her extradition last week.
Abortion in Louisiana is almost entirely banned unless deemed necessary to save the life of the mother or prevent “permanent impairment” of a life-sustaining organ.
New York, meanwhile, is one of eight states that has enacted an abortion shield law since the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that granted Americans a constitutional right to abortion.
Those laws are meant to protect health care providers from criminal penalties if they prescribe medication used for abortions to people in states where abortion is restricted or banned. Between 6,000 and almost 10,000 people in states with bans or restrictions on abortion receive care through a shield law every month, according to data from the Society for Family Planning.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has pledged to protect Carpenter, and she quickly rejected the Louisiana attorney general’s request to extradite the doctor last week.
“I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana, not now, not ever,” she said.
The future of the case is unclear, but legal experts agree that New York will likely not have to extradite Carpenter. There is a chance, however, that she could be extradited if she travels out of New York, even to Democratic-led states like California and Vermont.
“As long as she stays in New York, we may hear nothing more of that case,” said Greer Donley, an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. “The trial literally cannot happen without her presence.”
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, believes that current interpretation of U.S. law provides Carpenter with protection from extradition.
The extradition clause in the U.S. Constitution and the federal law that implements it primarily determine how extradition requests are treated at a national level.
Under federal law, Ziegler said, New York would only be forced to turn over Carpenter if she was in the state of Louisiana when she committed an alleged crime.
“The way that the precedent works at the moment is that you do not have to extradite people who were not in the state that is seeking extradition where the crime was committed,” she said.
But individual states are allowed to pass their own statutes on how they want to deal with extradition as well, according to Ziegler. Most states have passed uniform legislation stating that they will, in general, extradite any person they are asked to hand over.
State shield laws create exceptions to those extradition laws, which is why Carpenter potentially runs the greatest risk of being turned over to Louisiana if she travels to a state without one.
That risk is even greater if she travels to a state without a shield law that is also a Republican-led state and has more restrictive abortion laws than New York, both attorneys said.
But traveling to a Democratic-led state could also pose risks to Carpenter even if it has a shield law in place due to one major flaw in how the laws are written, according to Ziegler.
“On the one hand Democratic-led states [with shield laws] are not going to want to extradite you but on the other hand their laws are probably going to say they should,” she said.
Several Democratic-run states — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, according to a shield law tracker from health care nonprofit KFF — have abortion-related shield laws that specifically provide protections for providers regardless of patient location.
But while such laws have been written to protect state residents from extradition, investigations and other criminal prosecutions, they do not offer those reciprocal protections for non-state residents who committed their alleged crimes from other states, Ziegler said.
“I think that’s something that shield states might want to address,” she added.
