A man has sued three friends in Galveston County, Texas, for allegedly helping his ex-wife to procure abortion pills. Marcus Silva filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the three women, arguing that helping his former wife to obtain abortion drugs is equal to aiding a murder. But abortion rights groups have kicked against the lawsuit, calling it baseless.
This case is one of the major lawsuits that would be filed in Texas after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe vs Wade decision, was had been in effect since 1973. Silva is being represented in the case by Jonathan Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor-general who assisted with drafting one of the abortion prohibitions in Texas; Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain, and lawyers from Thomas More Society, a conservative legal firm.
According to Silva, the three friends helped his wife to get the abortion pills in July 2022 after she discovered she was pregnant; earlier in May, she had filed for divorce. So in essence, the unnamed woman filed for divorce in May but found she was pregnant in July and so recruited her friends to help. Their divorce finally came through in February 2023.
Showcasing several text messages between the friends as evidence, Silva said his former wife administered the abortion pills by herself after she obtained them through her friends. While it appeared that two women got the pills in Houston, the third one hand-delivered it to the former wife; and one of them even warned the wife to delete all text messages to protect them against her husband.
“Delete all conversations from today,” one of the women stated. “You don’t want him looking through it.”
Then the woman responded that she would delete the chats because her husband would look for anything to implicate her.
“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”
The pregnant woman was not named in the lawsuit, and she is exempted from legal prosecution under Texas law. The three friends who assisted her are yet to face criminal charges, but Silva’s lawyers said they will also bring litigation against the company that manufactured the abortion pill once they find out its name. “Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement from the attorneys.
Autumn Katz, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, on Friday, condemned the lawsuit.
“This is an outrageous attempt to scare people from getting abortion care and intimidate those who support their friends, family, and community in their time of need,” Katz stated. “The extremists behind this lawsuit are twisting the law and judicial system to threaten and harass people seeking essential care and those who help them.”
