Mother Jones illustration; Natalie Behring/Getty
In a case squarely aimed at breathing new life into the federal Comstock Act—and at thwarting the efforts of abortion-friendly states to protect providers and patients—a Texas man has sued a California doctor for allegedly mailing abortion pills to his girlfriend and is asking the court to prevent the woman, who is currently pregnant, from having another abortion.
In a wrongful death lawsuit filed Sunday, Texas resident Jerry Rodriguez is accusing California-based Dr. Rémy Coeytaux of violating numerous Texas abortion laws, as well as the Comstock Act—an 1873 anti-obscenity law that is still on the books—by providing the abortion pills that were used to terminate two of his girlfriend’s previous pregnancies.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Galveston, Texas, by former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of some of the most radical and punitive abortion laws in the country. Mitchell is a leading proponent of using so-called “zombie” laws—pre-Roe v. Wade abortion bans that were unenforceable for almost half a century—to outlaw abortion post-Dobbs. The most potentially sweeping of these zombie laws is the Comstock Act, the long-defunct sexual purity law that prohibits the mailing or receiving of anything used to perform or obtain an abortion. Mitchell and his allies argue that Comstock is still the law of the land—and, if fully implemented, would amount to a de facto national abortion ban. But first, he has to get the courts to go along.
Now, he’s asking a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to take the Comstock bait by issuing an injunction that stops Coeytaux from “distributing abortion-inducing drugs in violation of state or federal law.”
The case is the first known test of whether abortion opponents can use federal court lawsuits to circumvent state shield laws aimed at protecting providers—a major escalation of attacks on abortion-friendly states. “The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court,” says Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California-Davis, “both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”
“The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court, both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”
The federal court could choose to evade the Comstock claim and base its rulings solely on Texas’s wrongful death and abortion laws. “What Mitchell would like, if he won, would be a court to say, yeah, this guy is violating [both] Texas law and the Comstock Act,” Ziegler says. Mitchell’s ultimate goal, she adds, is “to somehow get that question appealed all the way up” to the US Supreme Court, where ultra-conservative justices have shown signs of being receptive to the Comstock claims.
In another alarming twist, Mitchell is seeking to certify the case as a class action on behalf of “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.” That language “seeks to confer rights on the unborn,” says Rachel Rebouché, dean at Temple University’s law school, “embedding fetal personhood in arguments around abortion pills as a national matter, and not just in states with personhood laws.”
Mother Jones reached out to Mitchell for comment, but he did not respond.
The facts of the case are exceptionally messy. According to the complaint, Rodriguez began dating his girlfriend last summer, while she was legally separated but still married to her estranged husband, Adam Garza of Galveston County. When she became pregnant in July 2024, the suit alleges, Garza was “displeased” and “ordered abortion-inducing drugs online from Coeytaux,” paying $150 via Venmo. The woman took the pills and terminated the pregnancy in September.
She became pregnant again a few weeks later, the lawsuit says, and Rodriguez claims she said she intended to keep the pregnancy. But, according to the complaint, Garza again obtained abortion pills from Coeytaux and terminated the pregnancy this past January.
She became pregnant a third time in May, Rodriguez says. In his filing, he tells the court, “There is a substantial risk that Adam Garza will obtain abortion pills illegally from Coeytaux and provide those” to her.
Coeytaux is a Stanford-trained licensed physician and a former medical school faculty member at Wake Forest University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. In November 2024, NBC News cited him as a representative of A Safe Choice, a network of doctors prescribing abortion pills by mail, mostly to patients in states with abortion restrictions. He recently acquired an office in Sonoma County, California. His website advertises $150 15-minute consultations.
Coeytaux is also the brother of Francine Coeytaux, an abortion rights activist and public health expert who for years has played a leading role promoting access to family-planning medications. At the Population Council in the 1980s and ’90s, Francine worked on the public introduction of the abortion medication mifepristone in France and helped bring the morning-after pill, Plan B, to market in the United States. Years later, in 2015, with other reproductive health experts and activists, she co-founded Plan C, a campaign to promote the provision of abortion pills by mail. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Plan C’s online information hub about medication abortion—with listings of clinics and services willing to mail abortion pills into all 50 states—became a popular resource for patients in states with abortion bans.
A man answering the phone at the number listed on Rémy Coeytaux’s website told Mother Jones, “No comment is being made at this time. I appreciate your interest, and I hope you can do a good job with the story, but there is no comment.” Francine Coeytaux did not return a request for comment.
Elisa Wells, another cofounder of Plan C, emphasizes that clinicians who provide abortion by telehealth are operating legally under the laws of their states. “Providers that are doing this are serving a real need,” she says. “The fact that there are these efforts to criminalize them or bring civil suits against them is outrageous.”
Now, Rémy Coeytaux is in the crosshairs of Mitchell, who—among other things—pioneered the “bounty hunter” laws giving individuals the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with potential damages of $10,000 per violation. This has made it significantly harder for abortion-rights advocates to challenge some extreme restrictions.
Recently, Mitchell has been helping men use the Texas bounty hunter law to retaliate against people who helped the men’s partners obtain abortion care. As Abortion Every Day’s Jessica Valenti has reported:
He’s represented at least three other men who’ve sued over women’s abortions—including Marcus Silva, who sued his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get abortion pills. That case was eventually dropped, but not before it came out that Silva tried to use the lawsuit to blackmail his ex into having sex with him.
Since then, Mitchell and other anti-abortion activists have been cozying up to men’s rights groups, “abortion recovery” ministries, and crisis pregnancy centers—on the lookout for more angry men eager to sue their partners or exes for ending a pregnancy.
Mitchell has also been pushing legislation and filing court cases aimed at reviving the Comstock Act, named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it. The law made it a federal crime to send or receive any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” writings, or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Over the years, courts greatly narrowed the statute’s scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraceptives. But Congress never formally repealed the statute’s abortion-related provisions, even after the Roe decision in 1973 rendered them moot.
President Donald Trump has so far resisted pressure from anti-abortion opponents to use the Comstock Act to institute a federal ban, even though the idea is embraced by the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the second Trump administration, Project 2025.
Meanwhile, Texas and other conservative states have passed increasingly draconian laws targeting providers of mail-order abortion medication. Abortion-friendly states have sought to defend against such aggressive tactics by passing shield laws designed to protect providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, professional discipline, and civil liability. Some 22 states and the District of Columbia have passed some sort of shield statute, with eight states, including California, adopting the most robust protections. Thanks to these laws, as well as the availability of abortion pills and telemedicine, the number of abortions has risen since Dobbs.
So far, shield laws have helped protect at least one doctor. Last December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York-based telehealth provider, Margaret Carpenter, in Texas state court and secured a $113,000 judgment against her. But a county clerk in New York has repeatedly rejected Paxton’s attempts to collect the fine, citing the state’s shield law. In January, prosecutors in Louisiana indicted Carpenter for allegedly providing abortion pills to a teenager. But, again citing the shield law, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has refused to extradite her.
“We’ve seen this dynamic before, with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”
Those were both state court cases. Until the Rodriguez case, shield laws have been untested in the federal courts, where the state claims could face major resistance.
Ziegler says it’s unclear why Paxton and Louisiana officials haven’t taken the shield law issue to federal court already, but the new case shows that Mitchell—who has a history as an anti-abortion provocateur—is once again unwilling to wait. “We’ve seen this dynamic before,” Ziegler says, “with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”
The federal judges in Texas are famously conservative and have proven extremely sympathetic to anti-abortion efforts to curtail access to abortion pills and other reproductive health care. As of Tuesday evening, the Rodriguez case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Andrew M. Edison, who was appointed in 2018.
With Rodriguez’s girlfriend already two months pregnant, Rodriguez claims that he fears that Garza “will again pressure [her] to kill his unborn child and obtain abortion pills from Coeytaux to commit the murder.”