Abortion has remained widely available to people living in states with bans thanks to abortion medication sent through the mail. But a lawsuit — the first one filed under a new Texas law — could dismantle the legal systems that have protected medical providers making drugs available in the state, the largest to ban abortion.
Under the recently enacted House Bill 7, private citizens can sue people who “mail, transport, deliver, prescribe or provide” abortion pills to people in Texas, with a minimum penalty of $100,000. The law also authorizes suits against drug manufacturers. Abortion opponents have hailed it as a new opportunity to stop abortions from taking place in states with bans, by threatening out-of-state abortion providers with financially ruinous penalties, and by explicitly challenging the legality of other states’ abortion protections.
Now, it’s getting its first test via a suit filed by Texas resident Jerry Rodriguez against a California-based doctor, Remy Coeytaux. Initially filed in July, the suit accuses the doctor of wrongful death for allegedly mailing medications his partner used to end her pregnancy. But Rodriguez updated his claim Sunday, citing the new law — which was passed after the alleged abortion took place — to seek a court injunction that would bar all medical providers from making abortion pills available in Texas, as well as asking Coeytaux to pay a penalty.
Jonathan Mitchell, a prominent anti-abortion lawyer who helped write HB 7, is representing Rodriguez.
This law is the first that aims to undo shield laws, which exist in almost half of all states. These laws say that the states, including New York and California, won’t comply with attempts from other states to prosecute health care providers for prescribing and sending abortion medication from states where it is legal — even if they’re mailing it to states with bans. Only eight shield laws explicitly protect providers even if they cared for a patient in another state.
“This is the first law that a state has passed that has specifically tried to counteract another state’s shield laws,” said Marc Hearon, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, who is defending Coeytaux. “All those provisions under this new law could be tested. It could be a bellwether.”
Beyond an injunction, Rodriguez will also seek $100,000 per incident “if discovery reveals that Coeytaux has mailed, transported, delivered, prescribed, or provided any abortion-inducing drug to any person or location in Texas since HB 7 took effect.” Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s testing out HB 7 — the willingness of people to do it, the willingness of courts to facilitate it, and trying to figure out if successful, will it chill provision [of abortion pills],” said Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
The legal process could take months to unfold. Mailed abortion medications are a key reason why the number of abortions performed in the United States has not declined since the 2022 fall of Roe v. Wade, despite the proliferation of state bans.
“The number of people accessing medication abortion is very significant and also represents a way that both patients and providers have in a sense just shown resiliency in the face of bans and restrictions,” said Kimya Forouzan, a state policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive health policy. “This specific targeting of a shield law provider is intended to try to cut off access to one of those last options.”
No case so far has successfully halted telehealth abortions. And in the wake of HB 7’s passage, shield law providers across the country indicated they would continue offering their services to Texans.
But the scope of Texas’ law, authorizing private lawsuits from countless private citizens, and its direct targeting of shield laws means that this case offers abortion opponents a novel chance to block telehealth.
“If it were successful, and he were able to overcome a shield law, that might change the calculus for some shield law providers,” Hearon said.
This case is just one of several that have been filed against health care providers offering telehealth abortions to people living under bans. But no other case cites laws that specifically challenge shield laws, and both have thus far been thwarted.
One civil suit, filed in January, accuses defendant Debra Lynch of practicing medicine without a license and of violating Texas’ abortion ban. Lynch is a nurse practitioner and the head of Her Safe Harbor, a Delaware-based shield law practice. A Texas court previously found another medical provider, Dr. Margaret Carpenter, guilty in a similar case, but her home state of New York has declined to enforce the court’s judgment. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has also brought criminal charges against Coeytaux and Carpenter; in both cases, their states’ governors have cited shield laws in refusing to cooperate. And Mitchell is also behind another civil lawsuit targeting a telehealth abortion provider under a wrongful death claim.
Abortion opponents have expressed frustration about their inability to block shield law protected care. Many have pressured the federal government to enact new restrictions on mifepristone, one of the two medications used in abortions, so that it would no longer be approved for telehealth.
There are three state lawsuits filed by state attorneys general pushing for the Food and Drug Administration to limit access to the drug. Federal officials at the FDA and Department of Justice have said the agency is already reviewing the drug’s approval— a move that could ultimately be used to implement national restrictions on the drug, including in states where abortion is legal.
“All of these efforts are a piece of shutting down mailing medication abortion. That is what appears to be now the singular focus of many, and all these lawsuits get at it in different ways,” Rebouché said. “All of them try to turn up this heat and make this argument that both mifepristone’s unsafe, which they’ve been saying for years, but also we’re in this untenable state of state conflict.”
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