Jonathan Mitchell has pursued high-profile lawsuits aimed at further restricting abortion access, especially by limiting mail-order abortion pills. He has struggled to find plaintiffs who generate public sympathy. One plaintiff, Marcus Silva, filed a wrongful-death suit seeking $1 million from his ex-wife's friends; that litigation was dropped after evidence emerged of Silva's threats and coercive behavior. Mitchell also represented Jerry Rodriguez in a suit that targeted the doctor who mailed pills rather than the alleged abuser. In Corpus Christi, a woman alleged a neighbor tricked her into ingesting ten abortion pills ordered from Aid Access; she miscarried and authorities have not charged the neighbor.
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. 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.
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.
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