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A Texas man has dropped his lawsuit against three women who helped his ex-wife obtain abortion pills, a case widely seen as designed to discourage private citizens from aiding women in using the pills in states where abortion is all but banned.
The move on Thursday by the plaintiff, Marcus Silva, was part of a settlement with the defendants, Jackie Noyola, Amy Carpenter and Aracely Garcia. The exact details of the settlement were not made public, but they did not involve any financial terms, according to lawyers for both sides. Ms. Noyola and Ms. Carpenter also dropped counterclaims they had filed.
Mr. Silva filed his suit shortly after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and one year after Texas essentially banned most abortions with a law that also deputized private individuals to sue anyone who “aids or abets” a woman seeking an abortion.
One of Mr. Silva’s lawyers is Jonathan Mitchell, a former solicitor general of Texas. The architect of the state abortion ban, he is considered a pioneer in using private lawsuits to deter the procedure. Abortion rights groups accuse him of filing the suits to attract publicity and intimidate people.
Elizabeth Myers, a lawyer for Ms. Noyola and Ms. Carpenter, said the fact that Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Silva did not want to move forward with the case was “very telling.”
“They live on the creation of fear,” she said. “They need the fear to ultimately lead to something real and it didn’t.”
Mr. Mitchell told The Times that he was just trying to give everyone the legal representation they are guaranteed.
“We see lawyers representing Al Qaeda terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, serial murderers on death row, child molesters like Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. “I’m representing fathers of aborted fetuses who have every right to pursue the legal remedies that the law provides.”
In this case, Mr. Mitchell was seeking to establish that state law recognizes that the rights of the fetus are the same as those of an adult. So-called fetal personhood is a longstanding goal of the anti-abortion movement.
As states, starting with Texas, have banned abortion over the last three years, anti-abortion activists have worried that women will use abortion pills to work around state bans. The bans prohibit both abortion procedures and pills, but anti-abortion groups say it is hard to track pills delivered by mail or provided by friends.
In 2022, Mr. Silva’s ex-wife, Brittni Silva, terminated her pregnancy after the pair had filed for divorce. Text messages from her friends — Ms. Noyola, Ms. Carpenter and Ms. Garcia — showed the group helped Ms. Silva obtain the abortion medication in Texas.
Mr. Silva’s suit accused the three friends of wrongful death, a civil charge, and sought $1 million in damages from each of them. Ms. Silva was protected by state law — a woman who has an abortion cannot be prosecuted or sued.
In his attempt to provide evidence for his suit, Mr. Silva went through his ex-wife’s phone without her consent to find the text messages, court documents show. In May 2023, Ms. Noyola and Ms. Carpenter countersued Mr. Silva, arguing that their privacy had been violated.
The trial over Mr. Silva’s lawsuit, which was scheduled to begin Monday, had been delayed in part over a separate argument about the admissibility of those text messages as evidence. That argument reached a Texas appeals court, which affirmed Ms. Silva’s right against self-incrimination and said Mr. Silva’s conduct amounted to“disgracefully vicious harassment and intimidation” of his ex-wife.
The case also raised broader questions over whether private information could be used against people who have or even seek abortions, or against those who help them.
In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission sued a major location data broker, arguing the company’s sale of geolocation data from tens of millions of smartphones could expose people’s private visits to places like abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters.
That case is pending, but in Nebraska, prosecutors successfully used social media messages between a mother and her teenage daughter to bring criminal charges against the pair after the daughter had an abortion. The mother was sentenced to two years in prison, while the daughter served 90 days in jail.
On the Texas case, Mr. Silva could not be reached for comment, but Mr. Mitchell said the settlement had been made in his client’s best interest and did not absolve any of the defendants of their alleged crimes. The defendants have openly said they did nothing wrong in helping their friend.
“For them to publicly admit and boast about their involvement to the media is exceedingly foolish, and their lawyers are committing malpractice by allowing them to talk about it,” Mr. Mitchell said.
Ms. Noyola said that she was fearful at the beginning of the case, “because, you know, we’re being told we’re murderers, and we’re not.” But she said she and the others grew stronger and that the fear went away.
“I was sure that he wasn’t going to win,” she added. “The bully won’t win.”
Ms. Carpenter said she wasn’t thrilled with the decision to settle. “It implies that we conceded in some way, and we did not. They dropped their claims,” she said. “We were ready to show up on Monday and fight it out in court.”
Reporting was contributed by Kate Zernike, Emily Bazelon, Natasha Singer, Shaila Dewan and Sheera Frenkel.
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