A Galveston man is suing a California doctor for allegedly providing his girlfriend with abortion-inducing drugs, the latest effort to test Texas’ anti-abortion laws against blue states’ protections for abortion providers.
Unlike other ongoing legal challenges in state court, this suit was filed in federal court, which opens up a new avenue to stress test these so-called “shield laws,” legal experts say. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, as red states like Texas were banning abortions, blue states passed these laws to protect abortion providers who mail medications into restrictive states.
“This is one of a many-pronged strategy to test these shield laws in as many ways as possible,” said Rachel Rebouché, the dean of the Temple Law School and an expert on shield laws. “But whether this case will go the way they’re expecting, there’s a lot we don’t know yet.”
Jonathan Mitchell, a prominent anti-abortion lawyer who helped design Texas’ abortion laws, brought the suit on behalf of his client, Jerry Rodriguez, seeking damages, as well as an injunction on behalf of “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.”
The complaint, filed [last] Sunday, accuses Dr. Remy Coeytaux of mailing abortion pills to Rodriguez’s girlfriend in September 2024. She allegedly used the medication to terminate a pregnancy that month, and later terminated a second pregnancy. Rodriguez says these abortions happened at the direction of his girlfriend’s estranged husband.
She is currently pregnant, the suit says, and Rodriguez fears that the husband “will again pressure [her] to kill [Rodriguez’s] unborn child and obtain abortion pills from Coeytaux to commit the murder.”
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But it’s not a clear path to victory for Rodriguez and Mitchell, legal experts said. Their claims are based on alleged violations of Texas state law; the judge could just as easily take California’s shield laws into consideration when deciding Coeytaux’s liability, Rebouché said.
“The complaint tries to make it out like the physician has been acting unlawfully, but that’s not true under California law,” she said. “At their heart, shield laws are about the question of whose law is in effect, and that’s true in federal court too.”
California’s shield law could also allow Coeytaux to countersue Rodriguez, and protect his medical license in California.
The lawsuit also alleges Coeytaux is in violation of the Comstock Act, an 18th Century anti-obscenity law. The Comstock Act has not been enforced for more than a hundred years, with some legal experts arguing it’s entirely unenforceable as a result, while others, including Mitchell, argue it can be used to federally criminalize mailing abortion pills.
“This lawsuit reads like a playbook of the anti-abortion movement’s various strategies to try to shut down mailed medication,” Rebouché said. “There’s a lot of strategies thrown in there — going against shield laws, Comstock, class action for all fathers, wrongful death. It’s notable to put them all in one document.”
Rodriguez also sued his girlfriend’s estranged husband and mother for wrongful death in state court. That suit is similar to a 2023 lawsuit filed against two Galveston women who helped a friend obtain abortion pills; the women countersued and both cases were eventually dropped with nothing to show for them.
The story references the efforts in Texas and Louisiana to undermine New York’s shield law via state courts. As noted, this one is in federal court, and any time you’re dealing with a federal case filed in Texas by one of these wingnut zealots you have to be prepared for something awful to happen. The 19th adds on.
The case, a civil complaint filed in the federal court for the Southern District of Texas, alleges that a California physician violated state and federal law by mailing abortion pills to a Texas woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy. As the first individual complaint to be filed in federal court, this case has the potential to end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court — the opportunity that abortion opponents have been waiting for.
“This is a big deal no matter what happens with this lawsuit,” said Mary Ziegler, an abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis. “We’re back to the same ‘can one state force another state to bend to its will’ question we’ve been at from the beginning.”
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There have been various efforts to block telehealth abortions and challenges to these shield laws.
The Supreme Court dismissed a case last year that sought to reverse the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to allow mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions, to be prescribed and taken through telehealth. Anti-abortion groups are also pressing the Trump administration to leverage the FDA or Department of Justice to restrict when and how mifepristone can be prescribed. So far, the federal government has taken no action, though Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has promised a federal review of the drug .
In Texas, anti-abortion lawmakers sought to pass legislation that would empower private citizens to sue anyone who provides telehealth abortions to Texans; the bill failed to pass, though it is expected to be considered in the state’s ongoing special session.
Say it with me one more time: The only way to fix this is to win more elections. What happens until then is largely out of our control, at least as far as litigation goes.