‘The battle between states is ripe for a legal showdown’

Carmel Shachar ’10 discusses the rapidly evolving legal issues around telehealth care delivered across state lines

By Elaine McArdle. Originally published in Harvard Law Today on Feb. 5, 2025.

ast November, the State of Texas — which has a near-total abortion ban — sued a New York physician for prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to a Texas woman. Two months later, in the first criminal case of its kind, a grand jury in Louisiana indicted the same physician, Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, for prescribing the drugs to a woman there. New York is one of eight states with a telemedicine abortion shield law that protect its physicians who assist women in abortion-restrictive states. But abortion-restrictive states argue that, no matter where the provider might be located, the patient, and hence the medical care, occurred in their jurisdiction and is therefore subject to their laws.

The battle between states is ripe for a legal showdown that may well end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, says Carmel Shachar J.D./M.P.H. ’10, assistant clinical professor of law and faculty director of the Health Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. In the January 30, 2025 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Shachar and two of her students — Sravya Chary ’25 and Morgan Carmen ’24 — published “Providing Interstate Telehealth Abortion Services to Patients in Restrictive States.”

Harvard Law Today spoke to Shachar about the rapidly evolving legal issues around telehealth abortion care.

Read the Q&A here.