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A Texas woman is suing a major supplier of abortion pills by mail and a former sexual partner, who she alleges terminated her pregnancy by lacing her drink with medication he obtained from the group.
In the complaint, filed tis week in Texas federal court by a prominent antiabortion attorney, the woman alleges that her ex-partner bought the pills from Aid Access, a nonprofit based in Europe, then pressured her to take them for weeks in the spring, even though she told him she did not want an abortion.
Aid Access is one of the world's largest abortion pill suppliers. Since 2023, U.S. doctors affiliated with the group have been able to mail the medication to patients in all 50 states under the protection of "shield" laws designed to safeguard providers from prosecution in states with abortion bans.
The wrongful-death lawsuit alleges that Aid Access violated the federal Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans the mailing of "obscene" materials, including those related to abortion.
Aid Access did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
The filing also accuses the woman's ex-partner of violating Texas law, which bans most abortions after six weeks and mandates that legal abortions be performed by a licensed physician.
Texas has emerged as a hotbed of novel legal challenges to abortion pills, now the most common way to end a pregnancy. So far, legal efforts trying to halt access to medication abortion have failed. Last month, a Texas man filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against a doctor in California whom he accused of mailing abortion pills that his girlfriend used to terminate her pregnancy.
The attorney behind the case is Jonathan Mitchell, who is known for counseling private citizens on suing people who facilitate abortions - and who designed the Texas law that enables such cases. Until Monday, Mitchell had filed lawsuits only on behalf of men who wanted to bring legal action against people who helped their partners have an abortion.
Mitchell is now representing the woman who says she did not consent to taking the abortion pills, and he declined to comment to The Washington Post.
Monday's complaint appears to be the first time a woman has filed a wrongful-death abortion lawsuit in federal court.
The details paint a picture of two people who conceived and fought over how to proceed - with devastating results, according to the complaint.
"Some of this is having that really sympathetic case and saying, 'Look how irresponsible the defendants were, that they were willing to give whomever these medications and that person took it and used it in nefarious ways,'" said Carmel Shachar, a law professor at Harvard Law School.
The woman's former partner declined to comment.
The pair lived next door to each other in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the ex-partner was stationed as he trained to become a Marine Corps pilot, the complaint says.
About six months ago, the woman, who has three children from a previous marriage, suspected she was pregnant and texted him asking what he would want to do, according to the lawsuit. He suggested an abortion, according to the text screenshots the woman included in her complaint.
On Feb. 4, she took a pregnancy test that was positive. The next morning, her ex-partner sent her a text saying he would "get the 2 drugs needed to discontinue the pregnancy," according to the complaint. The woman told him to "stop right there," the lawsuit states.
On Feb. 11, he allegedly told her that the abortion pills had arrived.
According to the lawsuit, he repeatedly brought the abortion pills to the woman's home, but she refused to take them. He allegedly tried to pressure her into taking them for more than a month. During that time, he showed her a receipt for the pills he bought from Aid Access, the complaint alleges.
In early April, he suggested that he and the woman spend time together in a "trust building night," the complaint says. He allegedly proposed that he would make "warm relaxing tea instead of alcohol," and the pair could catch up on a show they had been watching together. She agreed.
She did so, the lawsuit says, because she "viewed this as a last-ditch opportunity to get on reasonable terms."
On April 5, he visited the woman's home and made her hot chocolate, according to the complaint. Within 30 minutes of drinking it, she began "hemorrhaging and cramping," the lawsuit states.
In one text to her ex-partner later that night, she wrote, "I am gushing blood," it adds.
Ultimately, she went to the emergency room and lost her pregnancy at about eight weeks, according to the lawsuit. She later turned over pill bottles that she believed contained the remainder of the medication that her ex-partner gave her to Corpus Christi police. When asked about the alleged incident, a spokesperson for the department said Corpus Christi police had "a few reports involving those individuals" but no active investigations as of Monday afternoon.
The pill bottles included only the prescriber's initials, photos in the complaint show. Rather than naming an individual clinician, as in other abortion pill cases, the woman's lawsuit instead targets Aid Access and its founder, Rebecca Gomperts.
Since the Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion advocates have worried that conservatives would use the Comstock Act as a legal vehicle to shut down abortion pill mailing, a network propelled by Aid Access. Attempts from conservative attorneys and state prosecutors, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), to legally target providers affiliated with Aid Access, which is incorporated in Austria, and other physicians who practice under shield laws have stalled thus far.
The new effort from Mitchell, the woman's attorney, couples the Comstock Act with state law, as he did last month in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the California doctor, which also cited the federal law.
"The real goal here is to use Comstock to cut off the mailing of these prescriptions," Shachar, the law professor, said.
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