In the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, a Texas man is suing three women for “wrongful death” after they allegedly helped his ex-wife obtain abortion-inducing pills.
In his lawsuit, filed Thursday in Galveston County court, Marcus Silva alleged that his wife discovered she was pregnant in July 2022, when the pair were still married and after the enactment of a Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
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He is naming two of his ex-wife’s friends as defendants. The friends and the ex-wife talked about the pregnancy and how to end it, according to the lawsuit, which included screenshots of text messages. They also allegedly discussed trashing the pregnancy test and deleting all the text messages because they feared that Silva would go through them. In one text chain, one of the friends worried to the ex-wife that Silva would “be able to snake his way into your head,” according to the lawsuit.
“I know either way he will use it against me. If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me,” the ex-wife wrote in one screenshot included in the lawsuit, apparently referring to the pregnancy and potential abortion. “And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision. At that point at least it won’t matter though.”
The third defendant delivered the abortion pills, the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit does not specify if this woman is a friend of Silva’s ex-wife or was associated with an abortion rights group. The ex-wife self-managed her abortion at home, the text messages suggest.
Roughly two months after the alleged abortion, Silva’s ex-wife filed for divorce, according to court records. The divorce was finalized in February 2023.
Silva is being represented in the lawsuit by Briscoe Cain, a sitting Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives. He is also represented by Jonathan Mitchell, who rose to national fame when he helped pioneer the state’s six-week abortion ban, which was enacted in September 2021 and flew in the face of Roe.
Rather than rely on the government to enforce the ban, like past abortion restrictions, that ban was allowed to go into effect thanks to a novel twist: It let ordinary individuals sue one another for helping people get abortions. At the time, abortion rights activists warned that the law would turn everyday Texans into abortion “vigilantes” and endanger anyone who had anything to do with an abortion—down to an Uber driver who takes a patient to a clinic.
Abortion patients themselves are protected from being sued under the law. Silva’s ex-wife is not named as a defendant.
However, Silva alleges in the lawsuit that he considers the manufacturer of the abortion pills to also be responsible for the “wrongful death,” and that he intends to sue the manufacturer once he discovers its identity.
He is seeking more than $1 million in damages. A status conference in the case is set for June.
“This is an outrageous attempt to scare people from getting abortion care and intimidate those who support their friends, family, and community in their time of need,” Autumn Katz, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a Friday statement, according to CBS News. “The extremists behind this lawsuit are twisting the law and judicial system to threaten and harass people seeking essential care and those who help them.”
As of Monday morning, none of the defendants have attorneys listed in court records. One of the women did not immediately return a VICE New request for comment at an associated phone number, while the other two defendants could not be immediately reached for comment.
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