() A Texas man has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against a California doctor who he said supplied abortion pills to his girlfriend.
The man is also seeking an injunction to stop the doctor from mailing abortion pills across state lines, saying it is on behalf of a class of current and future fathers of unborn children in the U.S.
Jerry Rodriguez alleges in the lawsuit that Dr. Remy Coeytaux of California mailed the pills to Texas, where his girlfriend used them to end her pregnancy. The lawsuit says the girlfriend’s husband, whom she is separated from, helped her get the pills through the mail.
Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, making virtually all abortions illegal. Following the reversal of Roe v. Wade and an increasing number of state laws severely limiting or banning abortion, women have turned to telehealth services that provide medication to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
In response, states have also begun passing laws aimed at preventing women from getting a medication-induced abortion with the help of doctors who practice in states where abortion remains legal.
Rodriguez is alleging that Coeytaux broke several Texas abortion laws and also invoked a 19th-century federal law that has not been enforced in decades.
The Comstock Act, a law against vice, prohibits the mailing of obscene materials, contraceptives and abortion-related materials. The broad scope of the law has been narrowed by other laws and court rulings over the years.
“Assisting a self-managed abortion in Texas is an act of murder,” the lawsuit alleges.
While Rodriguez’s girlfriend can’t be charged for murder under Texas law, those who allegedly helped her obtain an abortion are not shielded in the same way.
Rodriguez said the injunction is needed because his girlfriend is allegedly pregnant again, and he fears her husband will convince her to have another abortion.
This is not the first attempt anti-abortion activists have made to target abortion pills sent through the mail. A similar lawsuit was filed against a New York doctor, Margaret Caprenter, by Texas, and the same doctor was criminally indicted by a Louisiana grand jury.
The Texas lawsuit against Carpenter failed, something experts say may have been because the suit was filed by a state and not an individual.
California, where Coeytux is based, has a shield law in place to protect providers who mail abortion pills across state lines, but that law has not been tested in court.
