Texas man sues California doctor in federal court, testing a new angle to crackdown on abortion pills

(The Texas Tribune) -- 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 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.”

A man who answered the phone at Coeytaux’s office said the doctor had no comment before hanging up.

Rodriguez is asking a judge to award him at least $75,000 in damages against Coeytaux for causing the “wrongful death of his unborn child.”

The case has some similarities to another lawsuit, filed in state court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against a New York doctor for allegedly providing abortion pills to a Collin County woman. While a Texas judge ordered Dr. Maggie Carpenter to pay more than $100,000, New York refused to honor that ruling, the first test of the state’s post-Roe v. Wade shield law.

Getting New York to enforce Texas’ judgement will likely take years, if it ever happens at all, in a case that many legal experts expect to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. But a federal court wouldn’t need to involve state courts to enforce their judgment, possibly sidestepping that minefield.

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.

This litigation comes as the Texas Legislature considers sweeping legislation to crackdown on the manufacturing and mailing of abortion pills. During this year’s regular legislative session, a version of this bill passed the Senate but stalled in the House. Gov. Greg Abbott added it to the agenda for the 30-day special session, which began Monday.