The refusal of states like New York to extradite those who violate other states’ pro-life laws by mailing abortion pills across their sovereign borders strikes at the very heart of our federalist system.
The state of New York is actively engaging in a rebellion.
I’m not just talking about its refusal to enforce federal immigration law, harboring and exporting violent illegal aliens to other states like Jose Ibarra, who was freed on cashless bail by the Empire State before he traveled to Georgia and killed 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley.
I’m talking about a refusal to follow the Constitution in a way that threatens to turn these United States into nation-states and warring entities, like the city-states of ancient Greece.
That rebellion comes in the form of state shield laws for abortion providers who ship abortion pills into pro-life states and their open defiance of the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause and the Extradition Clause, which require states to respect the legal proceedings and laws of other states.
Specifically, in February 2025, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, D, signed a “shield law.” Not only does it allow New York abortionists to remain anonymous when prescribing mail-order abortion pills, but it prohibits New York officials from cooperating with other states that seek to enforce their own laws against those abortionists.
Putting Ideology Above the Law
The central figure bringing this conflict to light is Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician who has been performing abortions since 1999 and is viewed by abortion rights advocates as a martyr for the cause, even garnering a sympathetic profile of her plight in Glamour magazine.
In 2022, after the fall of Roe v. Wade, she, along with fellow abortionist Dr. Linda Prine and lawyer Julie F. Kay, co-founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), a clinic that claims to provide “telemedicine abortion care to patients in all 50 states.” She also owns a company called Nightingale Medical PC that takes online orders for abortion pills, which it sends to women residing in states with abortion restrictions or bans,
However, Carpenter really came to national prominence after she sent abortion pills to residents within the states of Texas and Louisiana in late 2024, violating multiple state laws. Texas filed a lawsuit against her, while Louisiana obtained a criminal indictment.
In Louisiana, Carpenter was charged with a felony for sending abortion pills to the mother of a pregnant teenage girl, a girl who Carpenter never examined or even spoke to.
The teenager wanted to keep her baby, even going so far as to plan a gender reveal party, but her mother had other ideas. She conspired with Carpenter to obtain abortion pills before forcing her daughter to take them. The baby died and the girl ended up in the ER due to excessive bleeding.
In Texas, Carpenter is accused of sending abortion pills to a woman whose boyfriend was unaware she had taken the pills and had to take her to the emergency room when she started hemorrhaging.
In February 2025, Texas Judge Bryan Gantt blocked Carpenter from sending the abortion pills to Texas and ordered her to pay a fine of more than $100,000.
Carpenter never showed up in court.
When Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck refused to file the judgment against Carpenter, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Bruck.
Bruck claimed that he did not believe he was able to comply with the judgment due to the state’s shield law, and a New York Supreme Court justice agreed, dismissing the ruling and declining to take up the constitutional question of whether the shield law violates the Full Faith and Credit Clause.
Justice David Gandin found that Bruck had followed the state’s shield law and could not be sued.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced earlier this month that she will sue Hochul for not extraditing Dr. Carpenter in order to stand trial.
Providing Cover for Abusers
These legal battles illustrate the growing problem with so-called shield laws which have been passed by at least eight states.
Murrill plans to also sue California Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, for failing to extradite Remy Coeytaux, another abortionist who has been criminally indicted for “criminal abortion” after illegally mailing the chemical abortion regimen to a Louisiana resident.
Newsom’s response to the suit was a profanity-laced refusal.
In pure southern fashion, Murrill replied to Newsom, “Bless your heart, @GavinNewsom. Killing Louisiana babies isn’t healthcare, nor is shielding California drug dealers. The sovereign State of Louisiana will defend life. See ya soon.”
And Murrill’s statement is exactly right.
Shield laws enable legalized drug dealing.
In the case of Carpenter, she is not licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana or Texas. She did not examine the “patients” and she allegedly sent the pills, which are designed to kill another human being, to a patient’s mother without ever even speaking to the girl who would be taking them.
The practice is ripe for gross abuse.
In fact, it is becoming a preferred method for deadbeat men and abusers to force a woman to kill their child.
Which leads us to the story of Rosalie Markezich, Dr. Coeytaux’s unwitting victim. When she first learned she was pregnant, she was overjoyed and couldn’t wait to meet her baby. Her boyfriend, however, soon began pressuring her to abort, insisting the pregnancy would “ruin his life.” Markezich stood firm in her decision to continue the pregnancy. Undeterred, her boyfriend took matters into his own hands: Using her email address, he impersonated Markezich to order abortion pills from Coeytaux.
Coeytaux allegedly prescribed and mailed the regimen directly to Markezich’s Louisiana home without any in-person verification, discussion of her health history, or confirmation of gestational age.
After the pills arrived, Markezich’s boyfriend showed up and began relentlessly berating her to get her to ingest the medicine — to the point that she feared he would become physically abusive. Terrified and feeling she had no safe way out, Markezich took the pills while he watched to ensure compliance. She immediately tried to force herself to vomit them up, hoping to undo the act, but she couldn’t expel everything. Before long, heavy bleeding began. She soon realized the pregnancy had ended — the drugs had worked and her baby was gone.
Markezich has now filed a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), arguing that if the FDA had never relaxed restrictions surrounding the pills, which originally required an in-person doctor’s visit, her baby would be alive.
It’s become a rampant problem since the FDA under President Biden allowed abortion pills to be sent through the mail despite legal challenges from states.
In one case, Justin Banta, a Department of Justice employee, secretly dropped abortion pills into his girlfriend’s coffee. Banta had pressured his girlfriend to get an abortion which she refused because she wanted to keep the baby. That’s when Banta deceived her and slipped her the “Plan C” abortion drug.
The next day she began bleeding and had to go to the emergency room. Her baby was killed.
These men are only two of many.
In fact, mail-order abortion and shield laws will only dramatically increase what is already a plague in our nation: coerced abortion. According to a study by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, 60 percent of women surveyed said they were pressured into getting their abortion.
Now picture how easy it would be for a human trafficker or abuser to contact an abortion pill provider, claim to be the woman receiving the pills −or her husband or father− and force a victim to take them.
Beyond Abortion
And it’s not just abortion pills that shield laws can be used for. Shield laws pave the way for all manner of problems.
For example, a campaign worker for Zohran Mamdani recently said, “There’s no reason we can’t use telehealth and mailing prescriptions to people across the country to undermine state bans” on gender transition drugs for minors. He added that New York City could provide “free” gender transition drugs to every transgender person in the U.S.
Shield laws and mail-order drugs make this destruction of state sovereignty possible. It creates a war between states that allows one state to impose its values on another.
New Yorkers may believe abortion on demand up to birth is morally righteous, but voters in Texas and Louisiana don’t.
What happens if a state passes a shield law protecting people who send anthrax in the mail to abortion providers living in another state? Will New York like shield laws then?
And it doesn’t stop at mailing drugs.
Remember that California legalized taking a child from their parents and moving the child across state lines to California if it was for the purpose of gender transitions.
California shields such criminals, as well as those who perform gender mutilation surgeries, from the law enforcement actions of other states.
That’s legalized kidnapping.
The American federalist system is reliant upon each state following the Constitution, upholding federal law, and respecting the sovereignty of other states.
By passing shield laws, states like New York seek to dictate the laws in other states and to thwart law enforcement.
A Nation Torn Asunder?
If we are going to continue to be one nation, it is critical that states honor the Constitution’s requirements respecting interstate laws and actions.
Carpenter is legally allowed to send abortion pills to residents of New York. She is not allowed to send abortion pills to states that ban the practice.
By refusing to extradite her to Louisiana and refusing to file a Texas court’s fine against her, New York has left Texas and Louisiana unable to enforce their own laws.
And just like what happens when states refuse to enforce immigration law or give CDLs to illegal immigrants who can’t read English, people in other states are paying the price.
As the divide between red states and blue states continues to grow and blue states continue to interject themselves into the governance of red states, shield laws threaten to tear our nation apart.
It will be up to a higher court to declare such laws unconstitutional, otherwise we may not be the United States much longer.
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