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In court records, Jerry Rodriguez appeared to be a deeply aggrieved man who had pleaded with his girlfriend to not go through with her abortions, but to no avail. According to Rodriguez, she ended her pregnancies from abortion pills mailed to her from an out of state physician.
Demanding justice on Rodriguez’s behalf was anti-abortion legal mastermind Jonathan F. Mitchell, who was seeking an injunction to stop the physician —and all other medical providers—from sending pills to Texas, where abortion is banned. Mitchell amended the lawsuit to incorporate a new Texas law which he helped to draft, House Bill 7. The bill allows private “bounty hunters” to sue abortion-pill providers for at least $100,000 per violation. But there are some restrictions. The bill prohibits lawsuits from anyone who was found by a court to have committed “family violence”.
The San Francisco Chronicle looked into Rodriguez’s past and found that the Galveston man had evaded a felony arrest warrant for allegedly beating up the girlfriend whose abortions he claimed to mourn. And according to police records, he pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman he lived with in 2006 and to harassment for threatening to kill a different woman in 2009, spending a total of two days in jail.
Last month, Mitchell gave Rodriguez a lawsuit makeover and refiled a nearly identical lawsuit, adding his adult daughter as a plaintiff on the House Bill 7 claim.
Rodriguez’s sympathetic story falling apart highlights just how ineffective Mitchell and his allies have been—so far—in using such lawsuits to push their sweeping anti-abortion agenda.
Read Mary Tuma’s full story at motherjones.com.