New York doctor indicted in Louisiana abortion case recognized as a leader in women’s reproductive health

By Alaa Elassar, CNN
(CNN) — Dr. Margaret Carpenter, or “Dr. Maggie” as her friends and patients affectionately call her, has always been the brave one, says Dr. Ingrid Frengle-Burke, her best friend and former colleague. Carpenter rarely hesitates to speak up, questioning protocols that hurt her patients and advocating for anyone who feels unheard.
But now, Dr. Maggie, who has provided healthcare to thousands around the world in countries including Senegal and Ethiopia, is at the heart of a nationwide controversy for providing abortion care to women in states where access is restricted or outlawed.
A Texas judge on February 13 fined Carpenter $100,000 for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas. That same day, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul rejected Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s request to extradite Carpenter, who is facing felony charges for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor, whose mother ordered the pills on her behalf.
The cases against Carpenter are the first challenges by Republican-led states to “shield laws” enacted in their Democratic-controlled counterparts where abortion is legal. It also appears to be the first instance of criminal charges against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a patient in another state.
This latest attack on abortion access and healthcare providers like Carpenter, who are fighting to safeguard it, comes as Republican and Democratic states continue pushing efforts to either strengthen or restrict abortion rights.
Last year, Louisiana became the first state to pass a law labeling abortion pills as Schedule IV controlled dangerous substances, making it a felony to possess the drugs without a prescription. Meanwhile, voters in other states are fighting back; abortions resumed in Missouri over the weekend following a ruling blocking regulations that clinics said made it impossible to provide abortions despite a new constitutional amendment for reproductive rights.
Carpenter is one of the cofounders of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, a nationwide telemedicine-advocacy organization that provides abortion medication and other reproductive health care services to people across the US, including in states that have banned abortions.
Hochul said she will not honor Landry’s request to arrest and extradite Carpenter to Louisiana after the doctor was charged with violating the southern state’s strict anti-abortion law.
“Not now, not ever,” Hochul said in a video where she signed her rejection to Landry’s letter on Thursday.
“This doctor, who now faces a felony charge, was simply doing her job following both her medical oath and New York state law. Prescribing safe abortion medication is legal under the laws of our state and our reproductive health laws,” Hochul said.
Both cases in Louisiana and Texas could bring back the abortion issue to the Supreme Court, unleashing a new wave of legal questions – including how to settle disputes between the states about whether their abortion laws can be applied outside their borders.
CNN reached out to Carpenter for comment but has not heard back.
“It’s hurtful, it feels unfair, it doesn’t acknowledge all the women whose lives are dependent on this kind of care,” Frengle-Burke, a nurse practitioner and associate clinical professor at Mount Sinai’s Phillips School of Nursing, said of the cases against Carpenter. “It’s unconscionable.”
Amid legal battles and online attacks from politicians and anti-abortion activists, Carpenter’s patients and colleagues are speaking out in her defense, lauding her courage as a women’s rights champion and her decades of work advancing healthcare access globally.
‘I feel proud of her’
In November 2024, a 24-year-old woman who had recently moved to Austin, Texas, discovered she was about six weeks pregnant. She immediately knew she did not want to continue the pregnancy – but accessing an abortion in the state was not an option.
When the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights in June 2022, a Texas trigger law took effect, essentially blocking all abortions in the state other than those performed when the mother is “at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.”
In addition to criminalizing abortions, Texas allows private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone who knowingly “aids or abets” an abortion in violation of state law.
“I was terrified. I didn’t know who to go to. I didn’t know who to tell,” the young woman, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of legal repercussions, told CNN. “It’s daunting, having like that over my head and so many other girls’ heads, it just doesn’t feel completely safe.”
She said she wanted to contact the man she was involved with to ask for his help, but because she did not know his political stance, knew she would run the risk of being reported for getting an abortion. When a relative tried to bring her abortion pills from out of state, the doctors said they could not prescribe them without the patient being there in person.
Her only option, she said, besides traveling, was to get the pills online through Aid Access, another group where Carpenter worked as a provider to help facilitate access to abortion drugs in states where it’s illegal. The woman said she does not remember being in contact with a specific doctor and it is unclear if Carpenter was the provider to directly prescribe the medicine.
“At the end of the day, she’s doing the right thing,” the woman said. “I feel proud of her, I’m just very grateful that there are women like her.”
She received the pills about three days after ordering them online, and had 24/7 access to a hotline where she could text Aid Access employees throughout the process to talk through her symptoms and fears.
Organizations like the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine provide just a small portion of the US Food and Drug Administration-approved medication abortion pills to women in states where abortion is illegal, according to Frengle-Burke.
However, even in states where it remains legal, access to timely and safe abortions can be so challenging that telehealth abortion services like these are essential in ensuring women receive the care they need within the limited timeframe.
Medication abortion is a method by which someone ends their pregnancy by taking two drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — rather than having a surgical procedure. The FDA approved the drugs for abortion use more than two decades ago, and the regimen is approved for use up to 10 weeks gestation.
The legal consequences that doctors like Carpenter may now face simply for protecting, caring for, and saving their patients’ lives are “shocking and dangerous,” Frengle-Burke said.
“It’s a nightmare,” she added. Frengle-Burke, who has worked in countries with limited access to abortion, said the restrictions in the US, even in cases of rape and incest, is “shocking” and signify “a lack of progress in terms of equitable care for women and equality for women.”
Frengle-Burke said Carpenter has always known that providing abortion care for women in states where it is illegal could result in her getting in trouble. But that wasn’t her concern.
“She knows that she is right, that she’s fighting the good fight and she has a lot of people behind her that are supporting her,” Frengle-Burke said. “She knows that she has the capacity to help and that’s what’s driving her.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called Carpenter a “radical out-of-state doctor” in a press release published February 14, adding that doctors who send illegal abortion pills to the state “to kill unborn babies” will be punished “to the full extent of the law.”
In a video announcing the extradition warrant, Landry, the Louisiana governor, said the mother of a pregnant minor “conspired” with Carpenter “to get a chemical abortion bill in the mail.”
“This pill ended up ending her pregnancy and that baby’s life,” Landry said. “There’s only one right answer in this situation, and it’s that doctor must face extradition to Louisiana, where she can stand trial, and justice will be served. We owe that to the minor, and to the innocent loss of life, and to the people of this state who stand by life overwhelmingly.”
The Texas woman, who received the medication abortion — via telemedicine – through Aid Access, argued that both statements were “propaganda” and misrepresented Carpenter, she told CNN.
“She is providing access and help to girls that have nowhere to turn and to use that verbiage is defeating what she’s trying to do,” she said. “It’s just crazy that men in power and these politicians are allowed to even have a say in this, because they will never experience it. They just want to control women’s bodies.”
‘An inspiration, a hero, a fierce advocate for her patients’
Maya Gottfried remembers Dr. Maggie as the woman who saved her life.
Gottfried told CNN she was 35 years old when she was suffering from severe abdominal pain her nutritionist diagnosed as minor aches that could be cured with a dietary cleanse of lemon water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup.
Still feeling ill weeks later after going on the cleanse, Gottfried decided to visit Carpenter, who was her primary care doctor when Carpenter lived in Brooklyn. Carpenter “actually listened” to her, Gottfried said, and immediately sent her to a specialist who diagnosed her with colorectal cancer.
Gottfried told CNN that colorectal cancer was considered an “older person’s disease” and it could be a “fatal error” for a doctor to not recognize those symptoms.
“I have always credited Dr. Maggie with saving me,” she said. When Gottfried heard of the legal cases against Carpenter, who she has kept in touch with for over a decade, she cried.
“Dr. Maggie is an example of what I would hope every doctor would aspire to be,” she said. “Abortion is health care and everybody is entitled to health care.”
Frengle-Burke echoed Gottfried’s testaments – describing Carpenter as “an inspiration, a hero, a fierce advocate for her patients.”
Carpenter was working as a primary care provider at the Institute for Family Health in New Paltz, New York, when Frengle-Burke started working there. They shared an office together and immediately became close friends.
“She would spend time with her patients, she would advocate for them to be seen with providers outside of the institute, she would always push and question protocols that were in place that didn’t put the patient first,” Frengle-Burke said.
Carpenter didn’t initially plan on becoming a doctor, according to her friend. She first aspired to become a nurse, but with her parents’ encouragement and a growing passion for addressing public health challenges, she decided to go to medical school and began traveling to work at hospitals in countries throughout Africa.
“She’s always been compelled to reevaluate the way that we’re approaching public health problems and joining causes or initiatives with solutions for underserved populations,” Frengle-Burke said. “Her addressing the problem of lack of access to abortion care is just one of the many things through her career that she’s cared about.”
During her residency, Carpenter was working in Ethiopia when she noticed that hospitals did not offer cervical cancer screenings, according to Frengle-Burke. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women globally with around 660,000 new cases and around 350,000 deaths in 2022, according to the World Health Organization.
Even after returning to New York, her experience in Ethiopia remained with her, Frengle-Burke said. In 2013, Carpenter founded Go Doc Go, a non-governmental organization that trains midwives and physicians in Senegal, Ethiopia, The Gambia, and Haiti to screen women for cervical cancer while providing thousands of human papillomavirus tests and medical supplies annually.
“She’s brave, she’s creative, she’s an advocate, she’s kind, she’s fun, she’s a problem solver, and addresses things in ways that are just innovative and new,” Frengle-Burke said. “That, to me, makes her a hero.”
‘If doing that makes a person a criminal, then I think we should all be criminals’
The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, a group Carpenter co-founded, called the Louisiana case “the latest in a series of threats that jeopardizes women’s access to reproductive healthcare throughout this country.”
“Make no mistake, since Roe v Wade was overturned, we’ve witnessed a disturbing pattern of interference with women’s rights,” the group said. “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.”
In Louisiana and Texas, doctors must have a license in the state to provide telemedicine services to residents, unless there’s an exception. Prescribing medications, especially controlled substances, have additional restrictions including state laws and federal rules, which may require an in-person visit.
Louisiana could sue New York if its requests to extradite the doctor are rebuffed, according to legal experts. New York’s shield law prohibits law enforcement from cooperating with extraditions and arrests for charges related to providing healthcare that is lawful in New York. It also bars state officials from sharing information, issuing subpoenas or otherwise assisting investigations into such conduct.
Carpenter is at risk of being arrested and extradited to Louisiana, where she faces felony charges, if she travels out of New York State, according to federal law.
Tony Clayton, the Louisiana prosecutor behind the case, told CNN that there is now a warrant out for Carpenter’s arrest but declined to outline the next steps his office is weighing.
John Seago, the president of the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, praised Clayton’s decision to bring the case and told CNN, “It is very difficult to get a district attorney to go this route and to take on a big trend like the shield laws or Aid Access.”
Texas, which has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation, did not file criminal charges against Carpenter but accused her in a civil lawsuit in December of violating state law by prescribing abortion medication via telemedicine.
The Texas Attorney General’s office did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Although Frengle-Burke said she is disheartened by the recent cases against Carpenter and what they reveal about the state of equality in the US, she believes they have underscored the urgent need to “push the boundaries and challenge the directions that we’re going in.”
Gottfried agrees and hopes that more healthcare providers across the country will summon the courage to take a stance, just as Carpenter did.
“She’s a hero, and I’m so proud of all her work providing people with barriers to health care, with the care they deserve,” Gottfried said. “If doing that makes a person a criminal, then I think we should all be criminals.”
CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
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