some songs: The “Messy” Plaintiffs Behind So Many Anti-Abortion Lawsuits

A photo illustration of a white and blue box containing an abortion pill being punctured by three red arrows.

Mother Jones illustration; Anna Moneymaker/Getty; Getty

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Jerry Rodriguez appeared to be a deeply aggrieved man—the victim of a scheme orchestrated by his girlfriend’s domineering ex-partner to “murder” not one, but two, of his “unborn children.” In a lawsuit filed in Galveston, Texas, last summer on behalf of “all current and future fathers… in the United States,” Rodriguez was portrayed as a devoted boyfriend who accompanied his girlfriend to ultrasound appointments and, eventually, pleaded with her not to go through with abortions that her ex was trying to force her to have.

Weirdly, the villain in this anguished narrative story wasn’t the girlfriend’s estranged husband, but a California-based provider named Dr. Rémy Coeytaux whom Rodriquez accused of “wrongful death” for allegedly supplying the abortion pills used to terminate her pregnancies.

Demanding justice on Rodriguez’s behalf was anti-abortion legal mastermind Jonathan F. Mitchell, who was seeking an injunction to stop Coeytaux—and all other medical providers—from sending pills to Texas, where abortion is banned. This winter, Mitchell amended the lawsuit to incorporate a new Texas law, House Bill 7, that allows private “bounty hunters” to sue abortion-pill providers for at least $100,000 per violation.

The suit was part of a larger legal strategy by Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who has helped craft some of the most radical and punitive anti-abortion laws in the country, including Senate Bill 8, a six-week ban enacted in 2021, and HB 7 itself. Four years after the end of Roe v. Wade, abortion pills have become so widely available that the number of abortions across the US has actually risen, with medication now accounting for 63 percent of the total. Mitchell is trying to use the courts to resurrect the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era anti-obscenity, anti-abortion law that has been dormant for decades. If Comstock is revived, it would outlaw the mailing of abortion pills nationwide, amounting to a federal ban.

Sympathetic-sounding plaintiffs like Rodriguez are an essential part of Mitchell’s strategy. But a few months after the case was filed, Rodriguez’s story has fallen apart, highlighting just how ineffective Mitchell and his allies have been—so far—in using such lawsuits to push their sweeping anti-abortion agenda.

According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, at the same time that Mitchell was promoting his client as a symbol of aggrieved fathers-to-be, the Galveston man was evading a felony arrest warrant for allegedly beating up the girlfriend whose abortions he claimed to mourn. In October 2024—a few months before filing his lawsuit—Rodriguez had a violent altercation with his girlfriend at a motel. He allegedly grabbed the woman’s neck as if he was trying to “crush” it, the article detailed, to the point where she “believed she was going to die.” She told police the attack was the eighth time in five months that Rodriguez assaulted her. He then proceeded to slam her to the floor, climb on top of her, and punch and slap her until she finally broke free and escaped, the Chronicle said.

It wasn’t Rodriguez’s only alleged incident of domestic abuse. According to police records, he pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman he lived with in 2006 and to harassment for threatening to kill a different woman in 2009, spending a total of two days in jail.

“The decision to have an abortion is a personal, intimate choice. Who would have the gall to file a lawsuit over someone’s decision like that and splash it all over the papers, except for someone who intends to further abuse?”

Now attorneys for Coeytaux have asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit, in part due to Rodriguez’s abusive history. As it turns out, HB 7 specifically excludes anyone who has committed a “family violence” offense from suing under the state law, making Rodriguez ineligible to be a plaintiff. In a 43-page motion filed last Thursday evening, lawyers at the Center for Reproductive Rights offer a list of other arguments for why they thinks the suit should be thrown out—including the fact that all the allegations Rodriguez raised against Coeytaux occurred more than a year before HB 7 took effect. The law is not retroactive. The attorneys also argue HB 7 has “serious constitutional defects” that violate both the Texas and US Constitutions.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Marc Hearron, a senior counsel at CRR who is representing Coeytaux in the case, draws parallels between Rodriguez’s alleged violence and his lawsuit. “The decision to have an abortion is a personal, intimate choice,” Hearron says. “Who would have the gall to file a lawsuit over someone’s decision like that and splash it all over the papers, except for someone who intends to further abuse? This is not something an average person would ever do.”

Other legal experts were perplexed at the suit’s apparent conflicts with a law—HB 7—that Mitchell helped write. “The retroactivity part seems quite obvious,” says David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University and expert in abortion rights.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Rodriguez lawsuit is that it’s part of a pattern. In 2023, for example, a Mitchell client named Marcus Silva sued two friends of his ex-wife for wrongful death and $1 million in damages for allegedly helping her obtain medication to end her pregnancy. Then Silva was revealed to have a history of what a Texas Supreme Court justice called “disgracefully vicious” harassment and emotionally abusive behavior—including threatening to drag his wife to court if she did not have sex with him. The friends countersued, alleging that Silva knew about the abortion and, hypocritically, didn’t do anything to stop it. Silva eventually dropped the case.

Mitchell is coming up against similar issues in yet another wrongful death lawsuit, this one against international abortion provider Aid Access and its founder, Rebecca Gomperts. Last summer, a Corpus Christi woman named Liana Davis accused her ex-boyfriend, Christopher Cooprider, of spiking her cocoa with abortion drugs from Aid Access. Davis says she became pregnant in early 2025 but Cooprider “wanted the baby dead.” In text messages included in court documents, Cooprider insisted that the two were not an item and that it would be “messed up” for them to bring a child into the world. Cooprider, a Marine pilot in training, is now countersuing Davis for $100 million, alleging she framed him and lied about multiple pregnancies and miscarriages.

“These cases range from messy to downright wild,” says Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis. “It’s kind of a PR disaster.” The underlying issue, she says, is that Mitchell’s main goal isn’t to win justice for individuals claiming to have been harmed by abortion pills. It’s to use the courts to try to stop the flow of pills nationwide.

To find plaintiffs who can bring such cases, Mitchell—along with the state’s largest anti-abortion activist group, Texas Right to Life—have been working with religious ministries, crisis pregnancy centers, men’s rights groups and so-called “abortion recovery groups.” But these organizations tend to attract publicity seekers, grudge-bearers, and ideologues—“basically, people who have enough of an axe to grind to overcome the usual reasons that others might hesitate before opening themselves to this kind of exposure,” Ziegler says. And so the plaintiffs “end up being controlling, abusive, or dysfunctional themselves.”

The underlying issue, Ziegler says, is that Mitchell’s main goal isn’t to win justice for individuals claiming to have been harmed by abortion pills. It’s to use the courts to try to stop the flow of pills nationwide.

Another weakness of the cases, says University of Texas law professor Rachel Rebouché, is that they seek to place the bulk of the blame for abortions on out-of-state pill providers, rather than on the actions of individuals who may have manipulated a woman into getting an abortion.

“It’s pretty novel to go after a third party—the pill providers—rather than the person who allegedly coerced you or your partner into ending the pregnancy,” Rebouché says. “There’s a causation issue here, and it’s not clear to me that it’s going to be an easy argument to make to a judge.”

What’s more, the remedy Mitchell is seeking for his wrongful death lawsuits—asking courts to stop abortion-pill providers around the country from sending any more pills through the mail—is wildly overbroad, Rebouché says. “It’s like filing a physician negligence claim where you ask the court to never allow any doctor to be negligent ever again,” she says. “It makes no sense.”

Rebouché sees these wrongful death cases as experiments, akin to other efforts by anti-abortion lawyers and lawmakers around the country to find ways to stop the flow of abortion pills. “Mitchell is known for testing out a lot of different strategies and theories,” she says. “He’s not afraid to try something new and see what works.”

In Ziegler view, Mitchell’s goal may not necessarily be for his clients to win. Rather, his main objective seems to be to elevate the Comstock issue, in hopes of using the courts to force a nationwide abortion ban that the Trump administration—so far at least—has not been willing to put in place. Mitchell has strategically filed his recent wrongful death cases in federal court, where some ultraconservative Trump appointees—notably US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo—have shown themselves willing to issue sweeping national rulings. The Galveston federal judge hearing the Rodriguez case is also a Trump appointee. Mitchell’s ultimate goal is to get a case to the US Supreme Court, where the conservative supermajority might well agree that Comstock is the law of the land.

“Mitchell may not actually care about what the public thinks about his plaintiffs,” Ziegler says. “And no hole in the case may be too gaping with the right audience of like-minded judges.”

Cohen, however, is doubtful the strategy will work. “Mitchell has been wildly unsuccessful in various attempts to get [courts] to pay attention to the Comstock Act,” he says. “There’s no reason to believe yet another misguided attempt of his will succeed this time.”

Not to be outdone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—an anti-abortion ideologue who is running for the US Senate—has filed a handful of lawsuits also taking aim at out-of-state abortion providers, including Aid Access and Coeytaux. “Radicals sending abortion-inducing drugs into our state will be held accountable for ending innocent life,” Paxton said in a statement this January. “My office will defend the lives of the unborn and relentlessly enforce our state’s pro-life laws.”

While Mitchell’s cases lean more heavily on wrongful death and the Comstock Act as avenues to cut off abortion pills, Paxton is targeting shield laws—statutes that make it possible for abortion providers and helpers in blue states to safely care for patients living in places where abortion is illegal. Telehealth care under shield laws now accounts for 27 percent of abortions nationwide, according to the Society of Family Planning’s most recent data.

However, Paxton’s suits face their own problems. For instance, his office’s cases against Aid Access and another provider, Her Safe Harbor, run by a nurse practitioner in Delaware, are based on either the organization’s advertisements or news media reports, rather than relying on any tangible proof of patients in Texas actually receiving or using pills. These groups are a “notorious part of a growing network of out-of-state abortion traffickers that deliberately target Texas residents,” the state claims.

“The Texas attorney general’s case against Her Safe Harbor doesn’t seem to be based on any real investigation or actual evidence,” says Autumn Katz, interim director of US litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She pointed to another Paxton case filed last year against Texas midwife Maria Rojas, which also involved what turned she called a “shoddy investigation.” “This seems to be a pattern,” Katz says.

“Each case is weak factually for different reasons. But all face the same problem—shield laws that protect the provider.”

Paxton’s first attack on an out-of-state provider ended with a strong rebuke: In October, a New York judge dismissed Texas’ effort to enforce a $100,000 civil fine against Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a telemedicine doctor whom Paxton accused of prescribing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman. Carpenter’s medical services fall “squarely within the definition of ‘legally protected health activity’” under New York’s shield law, the judge found. The Carpenter case was yet another example of a disgruntled man seeking revenge on a woman’s reproductive choices: The patient was turned in by her ex, who found her abortion pill bottles at her home.

“Each case is weak factually for different reasons,” Cohen says. “But all face the same problem—shield laws that protect the provider.” And given that none of the cases involves a woman injured by the pills seeking compensation for that injury, he adds, “the shield law will hold up and prevent any judgment from being enforced in another state.”

The Paxton cases are similar to others in Louisiana, where Attorney General Liz Murill has sought to extradite both Carpenter and Coeytaux for sending pills to patients in the state. To Brittany Fonteno, president of the National Abortion Federation, these cases all highlight the hypocrisy of abortion opponents who claim that telehealth and mail-order pills enable “reproductive coercion”—which they define as disgruntled ex-boyfriends and other bad actors forcing women to get abortions they don’t want. Anti-abortion groups have even created legal resources, like the Justice Foundation’s Center Against Forced Abortions, to reinforce and promote this larger, national narrative.

But ample research shows that women aren’t being coerced in large numbers to have abortions; far more often they are forced to continue pregnancies they don’t want. Meanwhile, survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault frequently report that abortion pills are the very thing that makes it possible to escape their controlling and abusive partners.

“Access to abortion, including medication abortion, is critical to the safety and autonomy [of such patients],” Fonteno says. She cites patients like Alissa, a 21-year-old from Texas who was assaulted by her partner. “My husband raped me when I asked for a divorce and impregnated me in an attempt to get me to stay,” she told NAF. Abortion pills, she said, were her only option, since he also controls her finances.

“This type of freedom—particularly for women and marginalized communities—is empowering,” Fonteno says. But to anti-abortion extremists, she adds, it’s “terrifying.”