Texas Woman Goes After Abortion Pill Provider in Wrongful Death Suit

The filing includes a chronological series of events via text-message screenshots, all of which paint a devastating picture: the woman, after revealing she’s pregnant, is repeatedly pressured to have an abortion by the man. When she refuses to comply, he threatens to testify against her in a custody battle with the husband she’s divorcing, whom she says is both physically and emotionally abusive to her and her kids. The back-and-forth goes on, and eventually, the man suggests a “trust building night.” She alleges this was the night he slipped 10 abortion pills into a hot chocolate he made her.

It’s a truly grim tale; no one should ever terminate someone else’s pregnancy without their consent—and especially so through emotional manipulation. But it’s already illegal to drug someone; Mitchell is exploiting this woman’s story to push a larger anti-abortion agenda—and to jeopardize abortion access on a larger scale.

With the protection of shield laws, Aid Access has facilitated over 200,000 abortions in the U.S. since 2018. Coincidentally, a new paper published by JAMA on Monday says Aid Access has prescribed nearly 120,000 sets of abortion pills between July 2023 and August 2024—84% of which were sent to patients in states with near-total or total abortion bans. And as it stands, Texas holds the highest number of medication abortions via telehealth in the U.S. Mitchell’s lawsuit asserts that, by sending pills to Texas, Aid Access violated the Comstock Act of 1873. The dormant 19th-century law would prohibit sending “obscene, lewd, lascivious” things in the mail (check your own party, freak), which the anti-abortion movement insists would include abortion pills or supplies for abortion clinics.

The filing further asserts that “performing or assisting an illegal abortion in Texas is an act of murder.” Well, that’s a slippery slope into an absolute fallacy. To consider this incident a murder is to give sway to the stance that fetuses can be real people with real constitutional rights—and that’s just… not true. A similar situation happened in June, after Texas officials arrested and charged a man with murder after he spiked his then-partner’s coffee with abortion pills, causing her to miscarry. As Jezebel reported then, the move brought with it menacing wins for the fetal personhood movement.

The Lone Star State has been a hotbed for legal challenges to abortion access, and Mitchell’s been front and center. Using the state’s bounty hunter law that he helped create, Mitchell has a track record of finding and representing men who want to sue women for having abortions, especially if they traveled out of Texas to do so. In 2024, he represented at least three men trying to sue their intimate partners for abortions—two of those lawsuits remain ongoing. An attorney for one of the women previously warned that, if Mitchell wins, “any scorned lover could harass or intimidate their ex … for simply receiving a false-positive pregnancy test.”

Again, to coerce someone into terminating their pregnancy is cruel and unconscionable. But using the case as grounds for ending abortion access to hundreds of thousands? Cruel, unconscionable, and a terrifying abuse of justice.

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