Lev Radin/Sipa USA via AP Images
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks about abortion rights in the state, July 12, 2022, in New York.
New York governors land in the middle of more high-stakes drama than most state chief executives. But even given that, Gov. Kathy Hochul has faced a dizzying series of major developments just one month into the second Trump term. In just the past week, she’s had to respond to the federal nullification of New York City’s long-sought-after congestion pricing plan and surging pressure to oust New York City Mayor Eric Adams over the seeming quid pro quo dismissal of charges by federal prosecutors.
But a bigger test with nationwide ramifications continues to unfold. Wrestling with Texas and Louisiana over medication abortion and New York’s shield laws puts Hochul under a harsh spotlight that she would doubtless prefer to avoid with her 2026 re-election campaign on the horizon.
Two of Hochul’s Republican counterparts, Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas and Gov. Jeff Landry in Louisiana, are pursuing cases against the same upstate New York doctor. Last Thursday, a Texas judge issued a permanent injunction against Dr. Margaret Carpenter, co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, who provided abortion pills to a 20-year-old woman in the state. She’s been ordered to stop providing medication abortion care to Texans and has been fined $100,000. Appointed last year by Abbott, the judge in the case worked for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed a civil suit against Dr. Carpenter.
The order is a default judgement—the party hasn’t appeared in court or replied to the lawsuit. “But because Texas can’t really force the New York provider to appear in its state courts, the impact of the default judgement remains to be seen,” says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney for the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy.
On the same day, Louisiana issued a criminal indictment against Carpenter for providing pills to a Baton Rouge mother for her teenage daughter. Landry called for Carpenter to be extradited to Louisiana. (The state also is the only one in the country to regulate mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs most commonly used in medication abortions, as controlled substances.)
Declaring that she wouldn’t sign an extradition order, “not now, not ever,” Hochul doubled down on New York’s shield law prohibitions, which bar state and local agencies from assisting out-of-state legal prosecutions and investigations, or compelling an individual to appear in an out-of-state court, in cases involving reproductive care that is legal and available in New York, including care provided by telehealth to patients elsewhere in the country. In early February, Hochul signed a law allowing providers to request that pharmacies use the name of their practices rather than their own names.
At this juncture, neither Texas nor Louisiana has indicated how they plan to proceed. One possible scenario might see Louisiana heading to federal court to challenge the constitutionality of New York’s shield law on the question of extradition.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has declared that she would not sign an extradition order: “not now, not ever.”
More than 20 Democratic states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation or used executive orders to implement shield laws, and New York and seven other states (California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington state) protect telehealth providers regardless of a patient’s location. “The shield laws are designed to comply with the Constitution’s requirements related to extradition because they protect people who are providing health care legal in the shielding state while they are present there,” says Barrow. “They don’t protect the extradition of people charged with committing a crime while present in another state and then fleeing that state.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi is also looking into the Louisiana case, which may indicate that a Comstock Act play may be in the offing. It is a quirk of history that a New York governor is up against the ghost of a 19th-century anti-obscenity crusader, Anthony Comstock, whose contribution to American jurisprudence bears his name. Prior to the Dobbs decision, the Comstock Act had been functionally obsolete.
The Comstock Act’s ban on the transportation of lewd or lascivious materials through the federal mail has always exempted health care, including legal abortion care, says Barrows. Congress and the courts have historically backed this up. “But despite that history, anti-abortion advocates have attempted to reinvent this law and transform it into an unambiguous, no exceptions nationwide ban on abortion,” she says.
Vice President JD Vance and others in the Trump administration’s orbit have expressed interest in having the Justice Department do just that. During oral arguments for Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (2024), an unsuccessful challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, both Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas expressed interest in the Comstock Act.
Anti-abortion advocates are dissatisfied that governors like Hochul can devise shield law work-arounds to the strict abortion prohibitions in place in states like Texas and Louisiana. So they’ve grasped onto the Comstock Act’s abortion provisions as possible ways to render abortion illegal by prohibiting the use of abortion medication and any instruments that could be used in abortions, or to eliminate telehealth abortion as a health care option, shield laws be damned.
Dobbs hasn’t placated them, and shield laws have raised the stakes. “It’s really not the case that the [Dobbs] decision has left each state to its own devices,” says Barrows. “[Texas and Louisiana] are taking aggressive attempts to police not only citizens and residents within their own borders, but to influence the conduct outside their own state.”
“The constitutional law doctrines that might resolve some of these conflicts among two states or more to regulate the same conduct are unclear and undeveloped,” Barrows adds. Resolving these issues will not be easy, since scholars and jurists alike “are dealing with novel applications of existing law.” Which ultimately means that Govs. Landry, Abbott, and Hochul will wage a war of words until the Supreme Court clarifies or redefines the law of the land on abortion.
