Latest news with #MargaretCarpenter
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Louisiana investigates New York doctor for allegedly mailing abortion pills
Louisiana is investigating a New York doctor over accusations that she mailed abortion pills into the state, Liz Murrill, the state attorney general, said on Monday. The case marks the second investigation into the doctor, Margaret Carpenter, who Louisiana had indicted earlier this year for allegedly prescribing abortions pills via telehealth to a Louisiana resident. 'The young woman was 20 weeks pregnant,' Murrill said. 'She and her boyfriend after she gave birth took the baby, wrapped it in a towel and threw it in a garbage can.' Murrill said that police in Shreveport, where the abortion allegedly took place, were investigating the incident alongside her office. A spokesperson for Murrill's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment or documentation of the case. The couple ultimately went to the hospital, according to Murrill. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to 'self-manage' your own abortion using pills in the first trimester of pregnancy. However, these pills can also safely induce an abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy. Doctors Without Borders offers guidelines on how to use abortion pills through 22 weeks of pregnancy. Murrill made the comments while speaking at a state legislative hearing about a bill that would allow people to sue an individual or an entity that 'performs, causes, or substantially facilitates' an abortion. Louisiana already bans virtually all abortions. 'This bill provides for civil liability and allows another mechanism – it is another tool in the toolbox for people who are harmed by somebody who is intent on violating our laws,' Murrill said. Carpenter has so far avoided making public statements in the case. An organization that she co-founded, Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 'Make no mistake, since Roe v Wade was overturned, we've witnessed a disturbing pattern of interference with women's rights,' the organization said in a statement news of the first Louisiana case against Carpenter broke. 'It's no secret that 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.' Jeff Landry, Louisiana's Republican governor, has signed an extradition warrant for Carpenter, but she has not been extradited to Louisiana and New York's Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, has vowed to never sign an extradition order for her. New York is one of a handful of blue states that, in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade, have enacted so-called 'shield laws', which guard abortion providers like Carpenter against out-of-state prosecutions and civil lawsuits. In spring 2024, such shield laws helped facilitate more than 7,700 monthly abortions in states with total or six-week abortion bans, according to #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning. Texas has also sued Carpenter for allegedly mailing abortion pills into the state, in defiance of its abortion bans, but a New York clerk has rejected a Texas request to force Carpenter to pay a fine. Legal analysts expect the issue to wind up in front of the US supreme court.
Daily Mirror
12-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
Boy, 4, falls seriously ill with infection after visiting popular attraction
Michael, 4, was one of more than a dozen people hospitalised for at least one day following a shock outbreak of the cryptosporidium parasite at a Welsh farm earlier this year A young boy contracted a "nightmare" parasitic infection following a visit to a petting zoo that left him hospitalised during a family holiday. Michael, 4, visited Cowbridge Farm Shop at Marlborough Grange Farm in Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan, on April 11. The youngster was enjoying an annual visit to the farm to pet the lambs with his grandmother, Margaret Carpenter, as the rest of his family packed for a long-anticipated holiday to Malaga. But he fell unwell not long after the family landed in the Spanish holiday hotspot and was rushed to hospital, where medics were left puzzled by his nasty symptoms. Public health officials are investigating an outbreak of 74 cryptosporidium cases linked to the Cowbridge Farm Shop following Michael's horror infection earlier this year. The parasite can cause nasty gastrointestinal and respiratory symptoms, with the four-year-old experiencing a raised temperature and diarrhoea just two days after his family boarded their flight. Gareth Carpenter, Matthew's dad, said he initially believed his son's illness was caused by poor food or too much sun, and believed he would feel "right as rain" after some Calpol. Gareth, 46, from Bridgend in south Wales, said: "We put it down to the food, or that he'd had too much sun as we'd been out by the pool for a couple of hours." "We thought, give him some sleep and a bit of Calpol and by the morning he'd be right as rain." But he continued to feel unwell, and the parents were forced to stump up €5,000 (£4,229) to have their son seen by a nearby private hospital. The family said the ordeal was an "absolute nightmare" but heaped praise on "absolutely amazing" hospital staff after they saw a doctor "within 10 minutes" of arriving at the hospital. Doctors kept Michael under supervision for three days, during which time his parents said they had driven themselves "crazy" speculating about what may have made him so suddenly sick. They didn't discover he was infected with cryptosporidium until they returned to Wales and Michael had provided a stool sample, with Public Health Wales (PHW) confirming the parasite's presence a day later. As well as being one of 74 people who was infected, the service said he was one of 16 hospitalised for at least one night. Su Mably, consultant in health protection for Public Health Wales, said: "We are continuing to work with our partners to investigate this outbreak. Although cryptosporidium infection is usually mild and clears up on its own, it can cause more serious illness in young children and people with weakened immune systems. "If you visited the farm and feel unwell, please contact your GP or call NHS 111. It is possible for this infection to be passed on from one person to another, for example if someone is caring for a family member who is unwell. It is important to protect yourself by washing your hands well, particularly before preparing food." Michael has made a full recovery following his infection, with his parents adding no one else in their holiday party had contracted the parasite.
The Guardian
26-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Volunteers rush to send abortion pills to US women in need as ‘war between the states' looms
Seated around a circular table in a nondescript office building just outside Boston, the volunteers pack the abortion pills into envelopes with practiced efficiency. Each of the volunteers – five women and one man – have a unique role in the assembly line. One volunteer drops slim, orange boxes of mifepristone, the first drug typically used in a medication abortion, into the envelopes, while another volunteer adds green-capped bottles of the second drug, misoprostol. A few volunteers add brochures on topics such as how to use abortion pills or what to do if a woman suspects she has an ectopic pregnancy. Finally, one volunteer drops small purple cards into each envelope. They all bear the same handwritten message: 'We wish you the best.' The cards are signed with a swooping heart and a nondescript name: 'the Map', or the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project. By the end of the day, dozens of these envelopes will have been dropped off at a US Postal Service office – many on their way to people who live in states that have banned abortion. The Map is one of a handful of organizations operating under a controversial legal innovation known as a 'shield law'. Enacted by eight states in the years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, shield laws are designed to protect abortion providers from red-state prosecutions and legal actions, even if the providers' patients are located in states that ban abortion. Providers in shield law states routinely ship abortion pills across state lines: in spring 2024, they facilitated more than 7,700 monthly abortions in states with total or six-week abortion bans, according to #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning. But shield laws are now being put to the test. In December, Texas sued Dr Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor, over allegations that she violated Texas's abortion bans by mailing abortion pills to a Texas woman. Then, in January, a Louisiana grand jury criminally indicted Carpenter. The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, has refused to sign an extradition order for Carpenter. Citing the state's shield law, a New York county clerk has also refused to enforce a $113,000 fine, levied by a Texas court, against her. Now, Texas is expected to sue New York over the shield law – a move that could ultimately land the case in front of the supreme court, dominated 6-3 by conservatives, and tip the balance of power between states that protect abortion rights and those that do not. 'No one wanted this, but it's not unexpected,' said Dr Angel Foster, the Map's co-founder, of the state-on-state fight. 'I think we were prepared for this to happen, and we're waiting for the next shoe to drop.' The legal battle has not slowed down demand at the Map. Before dropping their prices last year, the Map was mailing pills to about 500 patients a month. Now, it provides pills to roughly 2,500 per month. 'Since the election, it's felt even more urgent to have a tangible and literally hands-on impact. A package is going to somebody who needs it, in a place where they are being denied their rights,' one Map volunteer said as she sealed envelopes. She spread her palm out on a package as if she were placing a hand on a Bible. 'It's going to a real person.' To order pills from the Map, a patient must be within their first trimester of pregnancy and at least 16, the age of consent for an abortion under Massachusetts law. After they fill out an online intake form, a licensed clinician reviews their chart; if a patient has questions, someone from Map will take their call. Because the organization operates on a sliding scale, patients can receive pills for as little as $5. On one recent Tuesday morning, Cheryl, a retired OB-GYN, sat in the Map's tiny, dimly lit office and quietly clicked through patients' charts, evaluating the answers to questions about the date of their last period and their past pregnancies. Patients shared why they wanted abortions, but Cheryl rarely lingered over their answers. One, however, struck her: a 25-year-old single mom who felt like another pregnancy would endanger her ability to take care of her child. It reminded Cheryl of the five years she spent providing abortions at Mississippi's last abortion clinic, which shuttered shortly after the supreme court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization paved the way for state abortion bans to unfurl across the US. 'That was a really common refrain: 'I just want to do right by the kids I have,'' Cheryl recalled. About half of the Map's patients, she said, already have children. They are also predominantly under 35 and people of color – similar to abortion patients writ large, at least before Roe fell. After Roe's collapse forced the Mississippi clinic to close, Cheryl started providing abortions in North Carolina – until that state banned the procedure after 12 weeks and the clinic where she worked no longer needed her services. 'I was sitting at home, being sad and useless and doing local advocacy stuff,' Cheryl said. She also grew increasingly angry and frustrated with what she saw as mass complacency with the post-Roe reality. That's when someone told her: 'I have just the group for you.' Working with the Map means assuming a certain level of risk. There is no way to guarantee that a staffer or volunteer won't get drawn into a lawsuit – or worse. To diffuse risk, the Map never mails anything that includes clinicians' names. Foster no longer travels to or through states with abortion bans, and does not drive outside of Massachusetts; she doesn't want to run the risk of getting pulled over for speeding and learning that another state has put out a warrant out for her arrest. This is also, in part, why the Map relies on an assembly line to put its packages together: there is no single person to point a finger at. 'I'm feeling like the people that have the power to protect us really aren't, so we just have to keep moving along and doing what we think is right,' Cheryl said. 'It's terrifying, but the whole world is terrifying. I feel like just walking down the street these days is terrifying. Someone's going to whisk you off and accuse you of writing an op-ed or something.' She asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her ability to travel in the US, although Cheryl has no plans to enter a state with an abortion ban. As Cheryl worked, a US map dotted with silver stars glimmered on the wall above her head. Each star represented the location of a patient served in October 2023, the Map's first month of operation. Although sky-blue areas like the coast of Oregon glinted with stars, most were clustered in the south-eastern US, which is now blanketed in abortion bans. Today, a third of the Map's patients come from Texas, which outlaws virtually all abortions, while another third hail from Florida and Georgia, which both prohibit abortion past six weeks of pregnancy. The map's constellations illuminate a paradox of the post-Roe US: even though 26 million women of reproductive age live under a total or six-week abortion ban, many are still receiving abortion pills in the mail or crossing state lines to visit a brick-and-mortar clinic. In 2023 and 2024, the US saw more than 1m abortions – some of the highest numbers in a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The question is whether this paradox is sustainable. Anti-abortion activists consider this kind of interstate networking an existential threat. While Texas and Louisiana have gone after Carpenter, a number of states have attempted to criminalize people who help others cross state lines for abortions. Courts have frozen many of those efforts, but these legal battles are far from over. With different US states now home to fundamentally contradictory reproductive regimes, both sides – whether they seek to punish out-of-state travel or offer banned healthcare – are scrambling traditional codes of conduct between states, creating new questions about what the constitution allows. These questions are sure to end up before the supreme court. 'There isn't really much of a precedent for anything like shield laws, and the courts are very conservative,' warned Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. The US constitution protects people's right to travel, but also mandates that states honor court rulings from other states – such as the fine that Texas won against Carpenter (because she and her lawyer did not show up to a court date in the state). In addition, the constitution specifies that, if an individual commits a crime in one state and 'shall flee from justice' to another state, that individual must be 'delivered up' – or extradited – back to the scene of the crime. Yet there's no evidence that Carpenter and other shield law providers did 'flee from justice'; rather, they're practicing within and obeying the law of their own home states. 'New York is going to say: 'She's not a fugitive. This is not the kind of scenario where a court should get involved,'' Ziegler said. 'Precedent would say they don't have to extradite her, and the question would become whether Louisiana can find a way around that.' Ziegler also questioned whether Texas could convince a court to force New York to collect its $113,00 fine. The constitution, she said, forces states to recognize fines levied in lawsuits between individuals – not necessarily fines that result from a lawsuit by a state against an individual. But Steven Aden, the chief legal officer and general counsel at the powerful anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, is bullish about Texas's chances. 'You can't go to Reno and incur a gambling debt in a casino and then go back home and raise a defense in court, when the casino comes after you for that gambling debt, by saying: 'We don't have gambling in our state,'' Aden said. Ziegler and Aden did agree on one thing, though: not only is the supreme court all but certain to take up Carpenter's case in one form or another, but the high court will likely see a deluge of similar cases over the next several years. 'These are the first shots fired in what we like to call – what we reluctantly, I guess, call – a coming war between the states,' Aden said. Experts have noted that the closest parallels are the pre-civil war battles over how to treat enslaved people who had escaped southern states (which permitted slavery) and fled to northern states (which did not). When these disputes reached the US supreme court, as in the case of Dred Scott v Sandford, the court repeatedly sided with enslavers and lent power to the federal government to enforce pro-slavery laws. The modern-day dispute between states over abortion is dramatically different from the 19th-century interstate battle over slavery – but Abraham Lincoln's famous warning still seems to resonate: 'A house divided cannot stand.' Other threats to abortion pills could soon imperil shield-law providers, too. The attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri are now pursuing a lawsuit that could roll back providers' ability to prescribe the pills through the mail. Anti-abortion activists are also trying to cajole the Trump administration to enforce the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials but went dormant under Roe. The Map would close if the law no longer protected its work, Foster said. But that doesn't necessarily mean she would give up. 'We might, as a group of people, decide to pivot and do something that's around civil disobedience, and create a different kind of entity doing different work,' she said. Even if anti-abortion forces prevail in court, there is likely no way to keep abortion pills out of US hands. The US Postal Service already fails, frequently, to detect the illicit drugs that swim through it. In addition to shield law abortion providers, there is a thriving online market for abortion pills that are sent straight from overseas pharmacies, allowing women to end their pregnancies without involving the formal US healthcare system. (Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to end your own pregnancy using pills in the first trimester of pregnancy.) For now, the Map has no shortage of volunteers. As the volunteers stuffed abortion pills into envelopes, a woman working in another part of the office building, who had no connection to the group, walked by the conference room and asked Foster: 'Can I volunteer?' Another bystander told them: 'Thank you guys for what you're doing.' It took less than two hours for the volunteers to package some 200 envelopes. Soon after they departed, another pair of volunteers arrived to add shipping labels and drop off the packages, discretely packed into a bin, at a nearby post office. In January, the Map was mailing roughly 150 packages a day – in part, Map project manager Andrea suspects, due to fears surrounding Donald Trump's inauguration – but that volume has slowed, to about 65 to 85 packages a day. (Andrea asked to be identified by her first name only.) A woman working at the post office once asked Andrea if she was running a jewelry business, given the number of shipments and the rattling sounds each package made. She had mistaken the pills for beads. Andrea smiled. She did not confirm or deny.
Chicago Tribune
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Steve Chapman: Crackdown on abortion providers and seekers is reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act
In the decades before the Civil War, Americans were deeply divided over slavery. When enslaved people fled north to escape from bondage, Southern owners demanded help in recapturing their property. Often, they didn't get it, which led to a federal Fugitive Slave Act requiring the return of runaways, with criminal penalties for anyone providing aid to them. Today, the nation exhibits a similar divide around a basic issue: the right of women to control their bodies through access to abortion. Again, states that stoutly deny human freedom — often former slave states, by the way — are at odds with states that uphold it. It's by no means clear who will prevail in the end. After the Supreme Court's 2022 decision discarding the constitutional right to abortion, Louisiana was among the first states to ban nearly all abortions. Some residents get around the law by traveling to other states where the procedure remains legal. Some turn to out-of-state providers for pills to end their pregnancies. (Nationally, medication abortions now account for 63% of terminations.) But in January, Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New Paltz, New York, was indicted in West Baton Rouge for mailing abortion pills to a pregnant teenager. When the governor of Louisiana demanded that the doctor be arrested and transported to face charges, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul replied, 'I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana, not now, not ever.' The parallels to the slavery fight are hard to miss. Anti-slavery tracts were banned from the U.S. mail in slave states, and bounties were offered for the capture of fugitives. Northern states acted to frustrate the catchers of enslaved people by guaranteeing jury trials for the runaways and barring law enforcement cooperation in catching them. Hochul's state is one of eight that have 'shield laws' barring cooperation with civil or criminal efforts to punish abortion providers who provide abortion pills by mail to patients in other states. But states that want to restrict this freedom have other methods. In February, a federal judge ordered the same New York physician to stop sending abortion pills to patients in Texas and imposed a $100,000 fine. New York, however, is unlikely to help the judge enforce his decree. Prohibitionist states are bound to take these fights to the Supreme Court — the same one that repealed the right to abortion. We are now presented with the specter of physicians being targeted by red-state prosecutors hell-bent on forcing their anti-abortion agenda on the whole country. Carpenter may not have to worry about being extradited by Hochul, but she has other worries. The demand from Louisiana means she would put herself at risk by traveling to any of the states that lack a shield law. She is effectively under house arrest, the house being the state of New York. She's not the only person in peril for helping women with unwanted pregnancies. Idaho and Tennessee have passed laws making it illegal to help a minor travel out of state to get an abortion without their parents' knowledge and consent. Idaho's attorney general said medical providers may not even refer a patient to an out-of-state clinic. A handful of Texas counties have passed laws making it illegal to use their roads — their roads! — to transport someone to another state to end a pregnancy. Texas Republicans, who firmly believe that overboard is the only way to go, have come up with another way to shackle those seeking abortions. A bill before the legislature would let private citizens sue organizations for mailing abortion pills to Texans — and make it a crime for anyone to help pay for someone's out-of-state abortion. Blue states now serve as a haven to those who want abortions. Numerous organizations help cover the medical and travel expenses of patients who need a procedure that is illegal back home. In 2023, more than 37,000 women and girls traveled to Illinois for abortions. The goal of all these efforts is to bolt every door through which such women and girls could find a way to end their pregnancies. The abortion-rights opponents resent the idea that citizens of other states could extend a hand to those unfortunate souls — much as champions of slavery demanded that Northern states silence abolitionists and return fugitives. In all these efforts, the health, autonomy and freedom of women and girls count for nothing. Kaitlyn Kash was forced to travel from Austin to Kansas to end a pregnancy after learning that her fetus had severe abnormalities. Surveying the deliberations of her elected representatives last week, she said sadly: 'I honestly didn't think Texas law could get much crueler.' But it can, and Texas is not alone.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
NY court blocks Texas from filing summons against doctor who prescribed abortion pills
A New York county clerk used the state's shield law to stop Texas from punishing a New York doctor for prescribing and sending abortion medication to a Texas woman. The move is the latest escalation in an interstate battle between New York and Texas, their differing abortion laws and the future of Margaret Carpenter, a New York state doctor who works at a telemedicine abortion organization. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Carpenter for violating the state's abortion ban after she allegedly prescribed and mailed abortion medication to a 20-year-old Texan woman. Neither Carpenter nor her lawyer responded to the lawsuit or showed up to a hearing regarding the charges in Texas last month, according to The New York Times. A Texas judge ordered Carpenter last month to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for prescribing abortion medication to the Texas woman. The Texas attorney general's office then followed up with the New York clerk's office to see if it would enforce the default civil judgment. But the country clerk refused. 'In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,' said acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck in a statement. 'Since the decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation.' New York Attorney General Letitia James commended Bruck for the move. 'New York's shield law was created to protect patients and providers from out-of-state anti-choice attacks, and we will not allow anyone to undermine health care providers' ability to deliver necessary care to their patients,' James said in a statement. 'My office will always defend New York's medical professionals and the people they serve.' New York is one of eight states that has enacted a telemedicine abortion shield law that protects providers from extradition requests and other legal actions from officials in states with abortion restrictions for helping or performing abortions. Paxton said that the county clerk's decision would not stop him from pursuing other avenues to enforce Texas's abortion ban. 'I am outraged that New York would refuse to allow Texas to pursue enforcement of a civil judgment against a radical abortionist illegally peddling dangerous drugs across state lines. New York is shredding the Constitution to hide lawbreakers from justice, and it must end,' he said in a statement. 'I will not stop my efforts to enforce Texas's pro-life laws that protect our unborn children and mothers.' Updated at 4:17 p.m. EDT Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
