Overview

• Jerry Rodriguez’s federal lawsuit alleges that California physician Remy Coeytaux mailed abortion pills that his girlfriend used to end two pregnancies.
• Rodriguez seeks wrongful death damages and a class-wide injunction on behalf of “all current and future fathers of unborn children.”
• The complaint accuses Coeytaux of violating Texas’s anti-abortion statutes and reviving the 19th-century Comstock Act to penalize the distribution of abortion materials.
• By filing in federal court, the suit challenges protective shield laws in blue states that have insulated providers from out-of-state enforcement.
• Legal experts say the individual suit approach may sidestep full faith and credit hurdles that hampered earlier state-led actions, such as Texas’s lawsuit against Dr. Margaret Carpenter.