California Finds Exciting New Way To Mess With Texas, Abortion Edition!
A new bill will allow doctors who prescribe abortion medication to remain anonymous.
Last month, after the Texas Senate voted in favor of gerrymandering the state within an inch of its life in order to eliminate as many Democratic districts as possible, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would be doing the same in his state.
This month, the Texas Lege passed a bill that would allow random citizens to sue doctors in other states for mailing birth control pills to Texas.
How are these two things related? I will tell you!
You see, California lawmakers have introduced a new bill, AB 260, that would allow doctors to prescribe abortion medication anonymously. In fact, not only will their names be redacted from the prescription label, so too will the name of the pharmacy that prescribed them and the name of the patient.
That’s pretty exciting already, but it gets better. California-based pharmacies actually fulfill most of the orders from telehealth doctors all of the country, so if this passes, it will extend those protections to those providers as well.
This means that — try as they might! — Texas’s abusive exes will have a real hard time finding anyone they can sue.
Lawmakers Democrats in California and several other states have passed shield laws that have so far protected their doctors from being sued by creeps from the Lone Star State, but we know that anti-abortion-rights legislators and lawyers have been desperately trying to figure out how to get past those laws. This law would bring an added layer of protection and make it even more difficult for them to do anything.
This also comes on the heels of the Texas- and Louisiana-based lawsuits against New York physician Margaret Carpenter. This past December, Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit against Carpenter for prescribing abortion medication to a woman in Texas. In February, a Texas judge decided in his favor and demanded Carpenter cease prescribing the drugs to Texas residents and ordered her to pay $100,000.
In February, Carpenter was indicted by a grand jury in Louisiana for “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,” and since then, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry has tried and failed to get her extradited to his state to stand trial. However, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has patiently explained to him that this is what their shield law is for and that she will, under no circumstances, be sending Carpenter to Louisiana.
This week, New York state Attorney General Letitia James also announced that she will be joining the lawsuit Ken Paxton filed against the New York county clerk who refused to help him get $100,000 out of Carpenter (on the side of the clerk, obviously). James will be there to defend the state’s shield law, which Paxton claims is “unconstitutional.” Unfortunately, he has yet to find the part of the Constitution that says that Texas can tell New York what to do.
The thing is, it’s very likely that this will ultimately go to the super conservative Supreme Court, which has, in fact, lately found that Texas can do anything it wants.
“This is really, really urgent,” an anonymous New York-based physician told NPR this week. “We're prescribing 12,000 pills a month to people all over the country. We need to get our names off these labels so that we don't have to live in fear.”
And they shouldn’t!
The law is very likely to pass, given that Democrats have a clear majority in the California Legislature, so that’s good news for all of us, really good news for the people of Texas and bad news for Ken Paxton and Jeff Landry.
Fugitive Slave Law Do-Over.
This is a damn shame this is even necessary, and it is all because of unreconstructed state-based regimes of terror.
It really matters when you have Democrats in office. It is Democrats that safeguard your freedom, and crucially Democrats enfranchise the groups that the unreconstructed hate.