As antiabortion advocates launch legal efforts to stop abortion pills from reaching women in states with bans, they are increasingly turning to one group with uniquely intimate and specific information to help them find cases: male sex partners of women who decided to end their pregnancies.
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The strategy propelled a first-of-its-kind lawsuit filed last month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that cited first-hand information from an unnamed “biological father” to accuse a New York doctor of illegally providing abortion pills to a woman in the Dallas area, according to two people familiar with the case’s origins.
The case was inspired by a report Paxton’s office received from the man and emerged as part of a broader abortion law enforcement operation the attorney general has quietly created that includes searching for potential plaintiffs, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
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This partner-focused approach will shift to a more public phase next month when Texas’s largest antiabortion organization launches an advertising campaign on Facebook and X to reach the husbands, boyfriends and sex partners of women who have had abortions in the state — with the goal of recruiting them to file lawsuits against those who assisted the women in ending their pregnancies.
“The strategy right now is to tell dads that if you’re the father of a child victim of an abortion, you have legal rights, there may be a way to hold these people accountable,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, adding that his group has already found several men who could act as plaintiffs in upcoming cases.
The effort is the latest indication that, nearly three years after the fall of Roe v. Wade triggered strict abortion laws across the South and Midwest, antiabortion advocates have remained largely stymied in their quest to end the practice.
Thousands of women in states with bans are receiving abortion pills through the mail every month. Many are relying on just a handful of websites that distribute the pills with the help of doctors in Democratic-led states — an operation that has infuriated conservatives determined to shut them down.
But cracking down on these websites has proved difficult. To take legal action, antiabortion advocates need to surface individual cases of women who obtained pills — typically an extremely private process conducted by a woman in her own home.
Among the few others who might know about a woman’s abortion is the man who got her pregnant.
While the unnamed father involved in Paxton’s lawsuit is not himself a plaintiff, at least three other male partners have filed legal action themselves over suspected illegal abortions since Roe was overturned — relying on a novel legal approach deployed by prominent antiabortion attorney Jonathan Mitchell. The approach hinges on Texas’s wrongful-death statute and the idea that helping someone obtain an abortion qualifies as murder under the state’s homicide law and Texas’s abortion ban, which outlaws nearly all abortions.
Abortion laws do not allow women seeking abortions to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate the procedure. But these kinds of legal actions often have significant consequences for the woman herself, particularly if she or her partner is named in the case.
“It can be very difficult to have all of this information made public and made public in a way that they don’t have any control over,” said Alex Wolf, a lawyer who has represented women targeted in several of these proceedings.
Even in cases where the names are not made public, the litigation process can be intrusive and intimidating for the women involved.
The unnamed woman in Paxton’s lawsuit who sought the abortion chose not to tell the father about her pregnancy, according to the complaint. After she took abortion pills — and experienced heavy bleeding — the female partner asked the man to take her to the hospital, where he was told by a health-care provider that she had been nine weeks pregnant, the lawsuit claims.
“The biological father of the unborn child, upon learning this information, concluded that the biological mother of the unborn child had … done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child,” Paxton writes.
The man later found abortion pills at the residence, according to the complaint.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The abortion laws that have taken effect since the fall of Roe have opened up a new avenue of legal recourse for men who disagree with their partner’s decision to have an abortion, advocates say.
“Historically, fathers didn’t have legal standing. They were shut out of the whole thing, because [the law said], ‘It’s a woman’s right to choose,’” Seago said.
Some of the men who have filed this kind of legal action have a history of verbal and emotional abuse.
“In some situations it is unfortunately a way to control or harass a former partner that is sometimes part of an unfortunate and long pattern of behavior,” Wolf said. “The lawsuit may just be the latest instance of an abusive tactic.”
When a Texas man filed a lawsuit in early 2023 against three women who had helped his ex-wife obtain abortion pills, he had a history of harassing his former partner, court records show. According to transcripts of recordings his ex-wife shared with the court, Marcus Silva threatened to persecute her if she didn’t have sex with him and do his laundry. He also threatened to send sex videos of her to her employer and her family and friends, transcripts show.
In a written opinion not to compel Silva’s ex-wife to provide additional information in the lawsuit, one justice on the Texas Supreme Court condemned Silva’s behavior toward his ex-wife as “disgracefully vicious harassment and intimidation.”
“I can imagine no legitimate excuse for Marcus’s behavior as reflected in this record, many of the details of which are not fit for reproduction in a judicial opinion,” wrote the justice, Jimmy Blacklock, who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
Silva dropped his claims in October. Mitchell, his lawyer, declined to comment for this story. Silva could not be reached.
At least one other man initiated legal action in hopes of persuading his partner not to have an abortion — retaining Mitchell and issuing a legal threat as soon as he found out the woman was planning to travel out of state to end her pregnancy.
That man submitted a petition in state district court under an unusual legal mechanism often used in Texas to investigate suspected illegal actions before a lawsuit is filed. If the woman proceeded with the abortion, even in a state where the procedure remains legal, the male partner threatened to seek a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the abortion and “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child,” according to court records.
That petition, filed in March, is still making its way through the courts. The man has so far not been able to obtain any additional discovery about his partner’s abortion.
Mitchell, the man’s lawyer, declined a request for comment.
For male partners initiating a wrongful-death case, the first step is frequently to request highly personal and sensitive information from the woman who chose to end her pregnancy, compelling her to hand over text messages and other documentation related to her abortion that could then be made public during discovery.
It can be particularly painful to learn you’re being targeted by someone you once trusted, said Wolf, the attorney who has represented women implicated in these cases. For some of the women, he said, these actions can be “a betrayal of something that may have been a good relationship at one point but no longer is.”
Texas Right to Life plans to file several of these kinds of lawsuits in different appeals courts in the coming months, Seago said — with the ultimate goal of getting one of them before the Texas Supreme Court.
The group’s employees have been contacting antiabortion pregnancy centers and “abortion recovery groups” that minister to men. They are particularly interested in cases that involve websites mailing pills into states with bans, and those that aggregate abortion pill resources.
“One of those websites is my ideal defendant,” Seago said.
You are what you read. Reveal your 2024 reader type with Newsprint.
The strategy propelled a first-of-its-kind lawsuit filed last month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that cited first-hand information from an unnamed “biological father” to accuse a New York doctor of illegally providing abortion pills to a woman in the Dallas area, according to two people familiar with the case’s origins.
The case was inspired by a report Paxton’s office received from the man and emerged as part of a broader abortion law enforcement operation the attorney general has quietly created that includes searching for potential plaintiffs, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Advertisement
This partner-focused approach will shift to a more public phase next month when Texas’s largest antiabortion organization launches an advertising campaign on Facebook and X to reach the husbands, boyfriends and sex partners of women who have had abortions in the state — with the goal of recruiting them to file lawsuits against those who assisted the women in ending their pregnancies.
“The strategy right now is to tell dads that if you’re the father of a child victim of an abortion, you have legal rights, there may be a way to hold these people accountable,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, adding that his group has already found several men who could act as plaintiffs in upcoming cases.
The effort is the latest indication that, nearly three years after the fall of Roe v. Wade triggered strict abortion laws across the South and Midwest, antiabortion advocates have remained largely stymied in their quest to end the practice.
Thousands of women in states with bans are receiving abortion pills through the mail every month. Many are relying on just a handful of websites that distribute the pills with the help of doctors in Democratic-led states — an operation that has infuriated conservatives determined to shut them down.
But cracking down on these websites has proved difficult. To take legal action, antiabortion advocates need to surface individual cases of women who obtained pills — typically an extremely private process conducted by a woman in her own home.
Among the few others who might know about a woman’s abortion is the man who got her pregnant.
While the unnamed father involved in Paxton’s lawsuit is not himself a plaintiff, at least three other male partners have filed legal action themselves over suspected illegal abortions since Roe was overturned — relying on a novel legal approach deployed by prominent antiabortion attorney Jonathan Mitchell. The approach hinges on Texas’s wrongful-death statute and the idea that helping someone obtain an abortion qualifies as murder under the state’s homicide law and Texas’s abortion ban, which outlaws nearly all abortions.
Abortion laws do not allow women seeking abortions to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate the procedure. But these kinds of legal actions often have significant consequences for the woman herself, particularly if she or her partner is named in the case.
“It can be very difficult to have all of this information made public and made public in a way that they don’t have any control over,” said Alex Wolf, a lawyer who has represented women targeted in several of these proceedings.
Even in cases where the names are not made public, the litigation process can be intrusive and intimidating for the women involved.
The unnamed woman in Paxton’s lawsuit who sought the abortion chose not to tell the father about her pregnancy, according to the complaint. After she took abortion pills — and experienced heavy bleeding — the female partner asked the man to take her to the hospital, where he was told by a health-care provider that she had been nine weeks pregnant, the lawsuit claims.
“The biological father of the unborn child, upon learning this information, concluded that the biological mother of the unborn child had … done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child,” Paxton writes.
The man later found abortion pills at the residence, according to the complaint.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The abortion laws that have taken effect since the fall of Roe have opened up a new avenue of legal recourse for men who disagree with their partner’s decision to have an abortion, advocates say.
“Historically, fathers didn’t have legal standing. They were shut out of the whole thing, because [the law said], ‘It’s a woman’s right to choose,’” Seago said.
Some of the men who have filed this kind of legal action have a history of verbal and emotional abuse.
“In some situations it is unfortunately a way to control or harass a former partner that is sometimes part of an unfortunate and long pattern of behavior,” Wolf said. “The lawsuit may just be the latest instance of an abusive tactic.”
When a Texas man filed a lawsuit in early 2023 against three women who had helped his ex-wife obtain abortion pills, he had a history of harassing his former partner, court records show. According to transcripts of recordings his ex-wife shared with the court, Marcus Silva threatened to persecute her if she didn’t have sex with him and do his laundry. He also threatened to send sex videos of her to her employer and her family and friends, transcripts show.
In a written opinion not to compel Silva’s ex-wife to provide additional information in the lawsuit, one justice on the Texas Supreme Court condemned Silva’s behavior toward his ex-wife as “disgracefully vicious harassment and intimidation.”
“I can imagine no legitimate excuse for Marcus’s behavior as reflected in this record, many of the details of which are not fit for reproduction in a judicial opinion,” wrote the justice, Jimmy Blacklock, who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
Silva dropped his claims in October. Mitchell, his lawyer, declined to comment for this story. Silva could not be reached.
At least one other man initiated legal action in hopes of persuading his partner not to have an abortion — retaining Mitchell and issuing a legal threat as soon as he found out the woman was planning to travel out of state to end her pregnancy.
That man submitted a petition in state district court under an unusual legal mechanism often used in Texas to investigate suspected illegal actions before a lawsuit is filed. If the woman proceeded with the abortion, even in a state where the procedure remains legal, the male partner threatened to seek a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the abortion and “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child,” according to court records.
That petition, filed in March, is still making its way through the courts. The man has so far not been able to obtain any additional discovery about his partner’s abortion.
Mitchell, the man’s lawyer, declined a request for comment.
For male partners initiating a wrongful-death case, the first step is frequently to request highly personal and sensitive information from the woman who chose to end her pregnancy, compelling her to hand over text messages and other documentation related to her abortion that could then be made public during discovery.
It can be particularly painful to learn you’re being targeted by someone you once trusted, said Wolf, the attorney who has represented women implicated in these cases. For some of the women, he said, these actions can be “a betrayal of something that may have been a good relationship at one point but no longer is.”
Texas Right to Life plans to file several of these kinds of lawsuits in different appeals courts in the coming months, Seago said — with the ultimate goal of getting one of them before the Texas Supreme Court.
The group’s employees have been contacting antiabortion pregnancy centers and “abortion recovery groups” that minister to men. They are particularly interested in cases that involve websites mailing pills into states with bans, and those that aggregate abortion pill resources.
“One of those websites is my ideal defendant,” Seago said.
