Louisiana Indicts New York Abortion Provider, Arrests Mother
These are the first post-Roe criminal charges brought against a doctor.
I wish I had better news for you today. In what appears to be the first time an abortion provider has been criminally charged since Roe was overturned, a Louisiana grand jury has indicted a New York doctor for shipping abortion medication to a teen patient.
Dr. Maggie Carpenter was indicted today on charges of “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,” a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. If Dr. Carpenter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was also recently targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Carpenter’s organization, the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), said in a statement, “It’s no secret the United States has a history of violence and harassment against abortion providers, and this state-sponsored effort to prosecute a doctor providing safe and effective care should alarm everyone.”
But Louisiana district attorney Tony Clayton didn’t just bring charges against Carpenter—he also arrested and indicted the patient’s mother, who obtained the pills. Clayton claims the woman coerced her daughter into having an abortion, but as the Louisiana Illuminator points out, “coerced abortion” was not cited in the indictment.
While we don’t know the circumstances around the teen’s abortion, we do know that conservative prosecutors have a history of lying about these cases or misleading press and the public. When Paxton sued Carpenter last month, for example, he claimed that a woman had “serious complications” after taking abortion medication—but his suit showed nothing of the sort.
It also turned out that it wasn’t the Texas abortion patient who brought the case to Paxton, but her aggrieved boyfriend, who was angry she ended her pregnancy without his permission.
All of which is to say: We should wait to find out more before assuming Clayton is telling the truth about coercion or anything else.1
There’s also a broader context here: The charges in Louisiana come at the same time that conservative state lawmakers are pushing and passing policies to prosecute anyone who helps a woman or girl get an abortion. This week, the Trump administration also gave anti-abortion extremists the green light to attack abortion providers without fear of consequence, and Republican lawmakers introduced legislation to repeal the FACE Act—the federal law prohibiting violence against clinics.
In other words, Republicans are launching a full-scale assault on doctors, patients, and the community members who support them both. More than that, they clearly want what’s happening in Louisiana to be a big, showy, public case. I mean, Clayton went on a talk show today to publicize the case!
Louisiana’s Attorney General Liz Murrill also highlighted the charges, tweeting earlier today:
“It is illegal to send abortion pills into this State and it’s illegal to coerce another into having an abortion. I have said it before and I will say it again: We will hold individuals accountable for breaking the law.”
Why make a big deal out of a criminal case that’s likely to be very, very unpopular? Because anti-abortion activists and big-money donors want to get this issue in front of the Supreme Court.
For example, the billionaire-backed Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), has been leading the charge against mifepristone since Roe was overturned. As researcher Ansev Demirhan pointed out last year, RAGA AGs were behind attacks on the FDA’s mifepristone regulations, they’ve threatened pharmacies against distributing the pills, and they filed an amicus brief to urge a Texas court to block the FDA’s approval of mailing mifepristone.
Now, with abortion medication allowing those in states with bans to get care, these extremist AGs, activists and donors want to make an example of a doctor—with SCOTUS’ help. It’s likely that Republican attorneys generals have been searching for the perfect case, and Louisiana AG Murrill was first to the finish line. And boy is she pleased to have a talking point:
This case really does have precisely what conservatives have been looking for—and everything I’ve warned about since Roe was overturned. I started raising the alarm over anti-abortion messaging around ‘coercion,’ for example, in 2023. That’s when the Charlotte Lozier Institute started to suggest Republicans use ‘coercion’ in their policies and cases because “no one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.” The tactic has only grown since.
Similarly, Republicans have been especially eager to restrict teenagers’ access to abortion: Both Tennessee and Idaho passed laws recently that made it a crime to help a teen obtain an abortion in any way. And when three Republican AGs brought their most recent case against the FDA over mifepristone, they focused in on revoking access for teens, out of supposed fear for their “developing reproductive systems.”
Finally, Republican AGs have been on the lookout for a case with an unsympathetic defendant. A mother who coerced her daughter into an abortion is a perfect victim for conservatives’ anti-abortion agenda. (Whether she actually coerced the teen or not.) We also saw this tactic in Idaho, when the state brought its first ‘abortion trafficking’ charges against a mother and son who had coerced the son’s girlfriend into an out-of-state abortion.
In short: The Louisiana AG clearly thinks she has found a winner of a case that she can bring to the Supreme Court to target out-of-state abortion providers. And I think if we do a little bit of digging, we’ll find that it isn’t just Murrill behind this move—but a national anti-abortion strategy backed by extremist billionaire dollars.
In the meantime, this is why laws like the one that just passed in New York are so important: This bill would allow providers like Carpenter to remove their names from abortion medication prescription labels, protecting them from zealous out-of-state prosecutors.
Either way, New York has doctors’ back. From Attorney General Letitia James:
“This cowardly attempt out of Louisiana to weaponize the law against out-of-state providers is unjust and un-American. We will not allow bad actors to undermine our providers’ ability to deliver critical care.”
Damn straight. To support Dr. Carpenter, consider donating to her organization, the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, here.
To learn more, consider some extra credit reading:
This is a hypocrisy to explore another day, but in a moment when Republicans are obsessively fighting for ‘parents’ rights’ to control their children’s health, it’s telling that they’ll arrest someone for coercing their teen into an abortion but pass legislation to ensure the same parent could force their kid into carrying a pregnancy to term.
The “parental rights” crowd sure seems to have changed their tune here, whether it was “coerced” or not. We don’t know that it was. If they can invoke “parental rights” to force a teenager to carry to term, why does it not seem to apply if a mother wants to help her teenage daughter have an abortion?
That doctor could have been selling Black Market drugs to teens and gotten a lesser sentence.
Whatever happened to family values, trumpublicans? I thought the banning of books was to protect them. The Ten Commandments in classrooms to protect them. Throwing educators out of schools to protect them.
But when it comes to a teen’s psychological and physical health, you want to punish them with early motherhood and poverty. A broken future.
Is it the sadism you all embody that keeps you in this deliciously grotesque mindset? That a young girl deserves to have her life destroyed because somebody (a father, brother, step-brother, uncle, pastor) acted on his jackassery to “get me some of that!”
Don’t tell me you are God’s servants on earth. Don’t pray for me with your hypocritical Just Come to Jesus bullshit. You are all phony pseudoChristian zealots who love to call yourselves righteous in the name of god or Jesus. You happily attend churches where pastors hide their sexual sins against your own children, then vote for a philandering rapist to save you.
There is an afterlife for all of you. Pain for eternity.