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A Texas man has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against a doctor who, he says, supplied abortion pills to his girlfriend.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in Texas on Sunday, Jerry Rodriguez alleges that the doctor, Remy Coeytaux, mailed the pills to Texas, where virtually all abortions are outlawed. Rodriguez’s girlfriend then allegedly used the pills to end two pregnancies.
Coeytaux not only broke a series of Texas anti-abortion laws, the lawsuit alleges, but also a 19th-century federal anti-vice law known as the Comstock Act. That act bans the mailing of abortion-related materials, but has been unenforced for decades, its scope narrowed by laws and court rulings – including Roe v Wade, which has since been overturned – that came into effect in the 20th century.
“Assisting a self-managed abortion in Texas is an act of murder,” the lawsuit alleges. Although Rodriguez’s girlfriend, the lawsuit continued, “cannot be charged with murder for her role in killing her unborn child, immunity does not shield Coeytaux from liability for aiding or abetting or directly participating in the murder”.
Rodriguez is seeking damages against Coeytaux as well as an injunction that would forbid Coeytaux from mailing abortion pills across state lines. Rodriguez wants that injunction, he said in his lawsuit, “on behalf of a class of all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States”.
Rodriguez also claims the injunction is necessary because his girlfriend is allegedly pregnant again, and he fears her husband – from whom she is separated – may urge her to have another abortion. His girlfriend’s previous abortions were also at her estranged husband’s convincing, according to Rodriguez’s lawsuit.
This lawsuit marks the latest attempt by anti-abortion activists to target the mailing of abortion pills, which have become a major avenue of abortion access in the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe, and to revive enforcement of the Comstock Act. In December, Texas sued Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor, over allegations that she violated Texas law by mailing abortion pills to a Texas woman. In January, a Louisiana grand jury criminally indicted Carpenter over accusations that she mailed a pill to that state, too.
Anti-abortion activists’ have been urging men who are angry about their female partners’ abortions to come forward and launch litigation.
However, because the Carpenter lawsuit was ultimately filed by the office of Ken Paxton, the Texas Republican attorney general, experts believe it may be fatally hobbled by a quirk of US constitutional law. Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis law school professor who studies the legal history of reproduction, has told the Guardian that while the US constitution forces states to recognize fines levied in lawsuits between people, it does not necessarily do the same for fines that result from lawsuits that have been brought by states.
Because Rodriguez is suing as an individual, his lawsuit may sidestep that hurdle.
Coeytaux declined to comment on the litigation.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Coeytaux is based in California, where abortion remains legal, and which has a “shield law” in place to protect abortion providers who mail abortion pills across state lines. They have never been put to the test in court.
Rodriguez is being represented in his lawsuit by Jonathan Mitchell, an attorney who masterminded a six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Texas in 2021. Although Roe was still the law of the land when the ban took effect, it withstood legal scrutiny because of its unique design: rather than being enforced by the state, it deputized people to sue one another over suspected illegal abortions.
