Anti-abortion Texas lawyer Jonathan Mitchell is at it once more. This time, he’s representing Jerry Rodriguez, a Texas man who’s suing a California physician for allegedly mailing abortion medicine to his girlfriend.
However as traditional with Mitchell, there’s rather more right here than simply the travails of Rodriguez.
First, the lawsuit is teeing up an assault on abortion capsule producers and distributors. Second, it’s an try and get a courtroom to rule that the Comstock Act, an 1873 regulation that criminalized the mailing of “obscene materials,” ought to apply to abortion tablets to forestall the mailing of them, even in states the place abortion is authorized.
The grievance is, in a phrase, gross. It’s plagued by references to how Dr. Remy Coeytaux “murdered his unborn child” and the way his girlfriend, Kendal Garza, “killed Mr. Rodriguez’s unborn son with abortion pills that were illegally obtained.”
Three members of the Girls’s March group protest in Texas in assist of abortion medicine in March 2023.
It’s a veritable cavalcade of statements about possession. His unborn son, his murdered youngster. Mine, mine, mine.
By no means one to overlook a chance to swing for the fences, Mitchell doesn’t simply say that Coeytaux is on the hook for wrongful dying. The producers and distributors of the abortion tablets allegedly taken by Garza are additionally liable. Per Mitchell, that legal responsibility comes from the Comstock Act, which the grievance says “imposes federal criminal liability on anyone who knowingly sends or receives abortion pills through the mail or by using any express company, common carrier, or interactive computer service.”
Besides it doesn’t.
Although conservatives are extremely keen to make use of the Comstock Act to decimate abortion rights, even in pro-choice states, no courtroom has efficiently dominated that it applies to abortion tablets. Hardcore right-wing Choose Matthew Kacsmaryk did rule that the Comstock Act bans the mailing of abortion tablets, however when the case made its strategy to the Supreme Court docket, he was overruled.
Mitchell’s grievance treats his allegation as settled regulation. This isn’t a authorized argument; it’s a polemic.
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Mitchell needs an injunction to bar Coeytaux from sending abortion tablets to Texas. That’s pretty regular—if horrible—on condition that Texas does have a really sturdy set of anti-abortion legal guidelines, largely due to Mitchell. However then it will get a lot weirder and far worse.
Not content material to solely search reduction for Rodriguez, Mitchell needs the courtroom to certify a category, which might enable him to pursue a category motion lawsuit. Who could be within the class? Actually each man. No, significantly. The proposed class is “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.” However in concept, an injunction and sophistication motion on this case would solely apply to Coeytaux.
Nonetheless, Mitchell states within the grievance that he plans so as to add the producers and distributors as defendants as soon as he identifies them. These firms are undoubtedly not in Texas, and they’re undoubtedly not sure by Texas’ rabid anti-abortion legal guidelines. At greatest, they may very well be barred from sending tablets into the state, however that’s not what Mitchell is proposing right here.
An abortion rights activist holds a field of mifepristone tablets throughout a rally on the Supreme Court docket in March 2024.
Mitchell’s proposed injunction is that anybody who distributes abortion medicine is violating the Comstock Act. And since Mitchell’s proposed class consists of each man, they might have the ability to invoke the Comstock Act to dam anybody from acquiring abortion tablets, even the place it’s authorized.
In regular occasions, this kind of case would rapidly be dismissed. However we don’t reside in regular occasions, and we wouldn’t have regular judges. Mitchell filed this case within the Galveston Division of the Southern District of Texas, the place there is just one choose.
So Mitchell knew that he would draw Trump-appointed Choose Jeff Brown, who has a file of being actively hostile towards abortion rights, together with opposing Roe v. Wade and serving on an advisory board for an anti-choice group in Texas. It’s not fairly as blatant because the GOP choose purchasing efforts to get instances in entrance of Kacsmaryk, nevertheless it’s nonetheless unhealthy.
That is actually Mitchell’s life’s work. He was the architect of the Texas regulation that enables anybody to sue anybody they allege aided or abetted an abortion. He retains attempting to depose abortion funds and researchers, and in 2024, he filed petitions concentrating on particular person girls for touring out of state to get abortions. He additionally dealt with the case of a Texas man who sued his ex-wife’s buddies, alleging they helped facilitate her abortion.
Mitchell’s arguments listed below are nonsense, however that doesn’t matter when the courts are full of conservatives desperate to ban abortion. He’ll by no means cease looking for new, revolutionary methods to deprive individuals of their proper to decide on.
What a strategy to reside.
