Abortion-Pilled Lawsuits seeking to scare women away from medication may have the opposite effect.

IN THE THREE YEARS since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Texas lawyer Jonathan Mitchell has made his name with splashy lawsuits that seek to throttle abortion rights further, specifically by limiting access to mail-order abortion pills.

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But Mitchell, who is the godfather of the Texas abortion “bounty hunter” law, has so far struggled to find plaintiffs who would endear themselves to the public.

Take Marcus Silva. In March 2023, Mitchell helped him sue his ex-wife's friends, demanding $1 million in damages from each, for causing a “wrongful death” because they allegedly helped her end her pregnancy. The litigation was dropped last year after Silva's ex-wife presented evidence that he threatened to upload videos of her to Pornhub unless she did his laundry and that he had claimed he wouldn't file a lawsuit if she continued to have sex with him. Mitchell has also represented Jerry Rodriguez, who claimed his girlfriend was repeatedly coerced into taking abortion pills by her estranged husband, although curiously, the lawsuit targeted the doctor who mailed her the pills, not the abusive ex. What the woman herself thought of being dragged into court was never divulged.

This summer, Mitchell finally found a woman willing to share a story of reproductive coercion that fit his agenda. According to the civil complaint he filed for her, the Corpus Christi woman was impregnated by a neighbor, and though the pregnancy was unplanned, she welcomed it, naming the fetus Joy and texting about wanting to “snuggle it and sniff its tiny head.” The neighbor, a Marine-in-training named Christopher Cooprider, pressured her to take abortion pills that he had ordered from the nonprofit Aid Access. When she refused, he allegedly spiked her hot chocolate with ten pills and tricked her into drinking it. She miscarried.

Authorities in Corpus Christi have so far declined to charge Cooprider with a crime. The police department said in a statement that “an extremely thorough investigation into the allegation” had led to the conclusion that “the elements of a crime could not be established, and the investigation was subsequently closed as unfounded.”