One afternoon in March 2023, Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter were sitting in their favorite Houston bar, having a glass of wine, when their phones lit up with notifications of an identical email. It was from a law firm in Washington, D.C., and it was offering to represent them in a wrongful death lawsuit launched by a man called Marcus Silva.
Thinking the email must be a prank, they sent a screenshot to a group chat with their best friends. “Look what Marcus is trying to do to mess with us!” Carpenter wrote. Silva was the ex-husband of another of their close friends, Lauren. For years they had heard stories of his abusive behavior, from verbal insults to going through her phone and hiding her car keys. The previous summer, Lauren had finally decided to divorce him. Then, as she was preparing to leave, she discovered she was pregnant. Terrified of being trapped in the relationship, she asked Noyola and Carpenter to help her obtain abortion pills. Over the years, Silva had made it clear he disliked his wife’s friends. So they weren’t surprised that, even after his divorce was finalized, he was still trying to harass them.
A reply popped up in the group chat. “Where are y’all right now? Don’t leave!!” one of their friends instructed. “This is real.” Googling around, she had found out that the emails weren’t a stunt at all; Silva really had filed a lawsuit. “Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter assisted … in murdering Mr. Silva’s unborn child with illegally obtained abortion pills,” the court papers read. The lawsuit contained snippets of conversations taken from Lauren’s phone, such as information about Aid Access—a telemedicine website the suit described as “a criminal organization that illegally ships abortion pills into Texas”—that Noyola had sent to her. Silva was being represented by Jonathan Mitchell, a notorious conservative attorney. Texas law prevents women from being sued for accessing abortion, so the two friends were named as the defendants.
“We just started spiraling,” Carpenter said. “There were documents out there with ‘murder’ written next to our names.” The pair knew that many of their work clients and co-workers leaned to the right, and they began to worry about how the suit could affect them professionally. Silva was seeking one million dollars. He had filed in Galveston County, a region known for a conservative court system that could well be sympathetic to him.
The women gathered their stuff and hurried home. For the next two weeks, they didn’t leave their houses, hoping to avoid being served papers while in a boardroom or client meeting. In between remote work, they compulsively scoured local news and social media, trying to gauge the atmosphere. It was surreal to see their private friendships splashed across the internet.
“The lengths that he took to basically inconvenience our lives were pretty shocking,” Carpenter said about Silva. “And the law gave him the power to do that,” Noyola added.
Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the anti-abortion movement has launched a fresh battle—this time, against the women using telemedicine to get abortion pills. These services have transformed access to reproductive health care—not just in states with abortion restrictions, but for pregnant people across the entire United States. Despite the Dobbs ruling, telemedicine helped overall U.S. abortion numbers slightly increase, from 1.124 million in 2024 to 1.126 million in 2025.
Medication abortion now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all procedures and, at least in theory, can be accessed by anyone with a Wi-Fi connection and mailing address. The immense success of this health care innovation means that conservatives now see it as the main hurdle in their battle against abortion—and lawsuits like the one Carpenter and Noyola were served are a key weapon in their arsenal. In December 2025, Texas passed a bill allowing private citizens to sue out-of-state providers who send abortion medication into the state, in a direct challenge to the “shield laws” passed elsewhere to protect such providers from prosecution. In May, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals briefly suspended the provision of mifepristone by telemedicine, in response to a legal attempt in Louisiana to force the Food and Drug Administration to require in-person assessments. (Later, the Supreme Court temporarily restored access.) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking an injunction against the nonprofit Aid Access and a California doctor, Rémy Coeytaux, and has also sent cease-and-desist notices to Coeytaux and two other online pill resources, Plan C and Her Safe Harbor. In addition to Louisiana, two other red states have filed cases against the FDA: Florida is seeking to end nationwide access to mifepristone by withdrawing FDA approval; and Missouri wants to invalidate every FDA policy decision on mifepristone except the original approval more than 25 years ago.
On top of these efforts, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ordered a safety review of mifepristone, which scientists worry will be politicized, and in March 2026, Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill that would strip mifepristone of its FDA approval, ban its use for pregnancy termination, and create a pathway for women to sue its manufacturer. Although criminalizing women for taking abortion pills has long been a red line that conservatives said they would never cross, even this pledge appears to be cracking: In March, a 31-year-old woman from Georgia was charged with murder for taking abortion pills.
One leading figure in Texas’s battle against “pills by mail” is Mitchell, the lawyer who represented Silva. A onetime clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, Mitchell is also among the architects of the pre-Dobbs “Texas heartbeat act,” which gave citizens the power to sue health care professionals in the state who provided abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. In his private practice, Mitchell has launched multiple lawsuits on behalf of individuals against those who have “aided and abetted” terminations.
A frequent argument, which can be spotted in Mitchell’s filings as well as in the various recent House bills and state lawsuits, is that the pills are harmful to women. Hawley has used evidence from a non-peer-reviewed study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, to assert that women need to be “protected” from the medication. The study claimed that 11 percent of women experience “adverse effects,” but it appears to have included normal side effects such as bleeding in this category. Louisiana’s case against the FDA, which is supported by the Alliance Defending Freedom and led to May’s temporary telemedicine ban, has been brought on behalf of a woman who claims that her boyfriend forced her to take the pills. And two of Mitchell’s recent cases allege that men used the medication to coerce their partners or ex-partners into abortions.
“Private lawsuits are the best promise to really overcome these shield laws,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, when I spoke to him in March. The public should expect more such cases in the coming months, he added. According to him, the pills aren’t dangerous only for the women who order them: “They are dangerous because they are empowering some of the worst guys out there.”
However, reproductive rights advocates claim the opposite is true: that the types of lawsuits being spearheaded by figures such as Mitchell are giving abusive men a new weapon to harass and control their partners. Those men are being enabled and empowered by both politicians and courts.
Carpenter, Noyola, and Silva’s ex-wife, Lauren, worked together at the same Houston bookkeeping firm. (Lauren is not her real name; TNR is using a pseudonym to protect her identity as a survivor.) Over the years, they became a tight-knit trio of best friends, organizing trips, celebrating holidays together, and taking turns watching one another’s kids. When they weren’t working or hanging out, the three texted constantly, discussing TV shows or dissecting the latest Taylor Swift release. Sometimes, Lauren used these conversations to vent about her husband’s volatile behavior. According to court documents, he often insulted and belittled her, and he tried to control how frequently she left the house and with whom she spent time. Silva was unemployed—Lauren was the sole provider for him and their two children—and he would get jealous of the time she spent at the office and demand access to her phone. She confided in her friends that she was continuing the relationship for the sake of her kids and feared being trapped in the abusive cycle forever.
Everything came to a head in April 2022, when she decided to bring Silva along to a company picnic. “He got extremely, belligerently drunk, and we ended up having to call the cops on him,” Carpenter remembered. He screamed that Lauren was a “slut” and an “unfit mother,” and he began insulting her friends. That night, he was arrested but not held. According to Carpenter and Noyola, the incident was the catalyst his wife needed to finally leave. In May 2022, she filed for divorce. The couple were still living together at the same address, however, and in early July Lauren discovered she was pregnant.
She and her friends texted as they always did. At one point, Carpenter asked Lauren what she wanted to do. “Not questioning if this is what needs to happen, I know it does,” she replied. She was scared she would never leave the relationship if she didn’t terminate, she explained. Texas had passed its “heartbeat act” almost one year earlier, and the atmosphere was thick with confusion about the options available to someone who wanted an abortion. The clinic that had previously stood down the road from their office was now closed. Noyola reached out to an old college friend—Aracely Garcia, who was named in the suit as a third defendant—who she knew was active in women’s rights circles. She soon learned that there were still ways to access pills in Houston. “If I don’t have to travel that would make things so much easier,” Lauren wrote. On July 14, 2022, she took the pills. “Your help means the world to me,” she texted her friends. “I’m so lucky to have y’all. Really.”
Unbeknownst to her, Silva had twice rifled through her purse, and found both the text messages and then the first of the pills. Rather than try to stop her from terminating the pregnancy, he quietly photographed the conversations and placed everything back where he found it. On July 18, he went to the local police department to file a report. “He told me he knew,” Lauren texted her friends, distraught. “Now he’s using that against me and saying he will send me to jail if I don’t do what he wants.” Silva was demanding that she sell the house and give him primary custody of their kids.
The woman pushed ahead with the divorce, which was finalized in February 2023. A month later, Silva filed his suit. Although Lauren could not be sued directly, she was subpoenaed in the case against her friends, and the papers contained plenty of inflammatory language about her. (She successfully fought the subpoena.) Details about her private life were now completely public.
Experts who worked on the case are clear about the lawsuit’s goals. “My impression was always that this was never really a wrongful death lawsuit,” said Kendall Speer, an attorney who represented Noyola and Carpenter. “He wasn’t really suing for the injury of losing his unborn child. His goal was always to hurt his former spouse and her friends.”
It’s not just friends or family members in the firing lines of Mitchell’s cases. Another recent lawsuit names the California doctor Coeytaux as a defendant. The case has been filed at federal level, presenting a direct challenge to the state’s shield laws. It has also become a cause célèbre among anti-abortion advocates, who say it is proof that pills by mail can enable abusers. The plaintiff is Jerry Rodriguez, a 57-year-old man from the Houston suburbs, who says his girlfriend became pregnant in July 2024, one month after they started dating. According to the papers, her estranged husband, Adam Garza—they were separated but not divorced—was displeased. He purchased abortion pills for her online from Dr. Coeytaux, the lawsuit alleges, and pressured her to take them at her mother’s house.
Rodriguez’s girlfriend got pregnant again in late October 2024, and Rodriguez claims that Garza gave her pills yet again, this time when she was three months along. By the time Rodriguez filed the suit, in July 2025, the woman was pregnant once more, this time two months along, and he was seeking an injunction to stop Garza from giving her more pills.
The woman and her family, whom TNR is choosing not to name, said they cannot comment while the case is ongoing. However, a police report from neighboring Harris County, as first reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, shines a light on a different side of the story. At 9:30 p.m. on October 29, 2024, officers were called to a medical center in Webster, a small town on the southeastern outskirts of Houston, to interview Rodriguez’s girlfriend. They noted that she had cuts and scratches across her chest and face, as well as red marks on her neck consistent with strangulation. She told them she had been with Rodriguez at a local motel, where he noticed that she was wearing a new set of nails. Growing angry, he grabbed her by the throat and slammed her to the ground, then throttled and repeatedly punched her. When he went to the bathroom, she managed to escape, running down the road to shelter in a nearby Waffle House. Over the past five months, she explained to the officers, Rodriguez had strangled her eight times and threatened to kill her, promising her that she would be “his 15th kill.” As the officers noted in their report, he had a previous domestic abuse conviction from 2006.
According to the woman’s public Facebook posts, she gave birth to a baby in February 2026. The following month, court filings show, she sued Rodriguez for child custody and was granted a temporary restraining order. A recent social media update shows her standing next to Garza, the estranged husband who allegedly forced her to take the pills, gazing at him while looking happy and radiant. “He’s still the first one I call if I’m in need of help, advice, or need to vent,” she wrote. “So thanks, Ad. For just being you. A genuinely good father, friend and man.”
Silva and Rodriguez aren’t the only plaintiffs of Mitchell’s who have been accused of mistreating their partners. In 2024, Mitchell submitted a petition on behalf of a Texas man, Collin Davis, requesting the power to investigate his former partner’s trip to access an out-of-state abortion in Colorado. The woman’s lawyer described her relationship with Davis as “toxic and harmful.”
Other previous cases of Mitchell’s include at least seven petitions targeting abortion funds, providers, and women’s health researchers. Paxton, the Texas attorney general, cited a lawsuit of Mitchell’s in his indictments. That case, filed last August in Corpus Christi, was on behalf of a 37-year-old woman called Liana Davis, who said her boyfriend had spiked her drink with the pills. So far, none of Mitchell’s suits have been successful. Mark Heron, a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights who is representing Coeytaux, predicts that the latest won’t be either. “These are crazy cases,” Heron said. “These are not how wrongful death is supposed to be used.” To prove a wrongful death, he explained, “you need to have a wrongful act.” To get around this, Mitchell is trying to resurrect the Comstock Act, a dormant nineteenth-century “chastity” law that prohibited mailing any type of “obscene” material, including birth control, pornography, and sex toys. But even if these cases aren’t seeing results in the courtroom, they are still making an impact. The National Domestic Violence Hotline found, in a 2024 survey, that hundreds of survivors said their partners had threatened to sue them or call the police if they had an abortion.
Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this article. In previous interviews, however, he has claimed that he is not an anti-abortion activist; rather, he simply wants to challenge the Supreme Court’s authority. Heron is skeptical of this argument. “It’s clearly ideological,” he said. Take the example of Davis, whose drink was allegedly spiked. “There’s a clear tort there for harm to the woman’s body, but he didn’t bring that claim,” he explained. Instead, Mitchell sued for wrongful death of the fetus.
The cases represent an acceleration of a tactic that has been brewing for years. In 2019, Ryan Magers, a 19-year-old Alabama man, made headlines around the world when a judge allowed him to sue a local women’s health clinic on behalf of his ex-girlfriend’s aborted fetus—the first time such a decision was allowed. “I’m here for the men who actually want to have their baby,” Magers said when announcing the lawsuit. The father of his ex-girlfriend, who was only 16 when she became pregnant, spoke anonymously to The Washington Post, saying the family was “distraught” over the case. He explained that she was no longer with Magers, who was unemployed, and that he had been pressuring her to have sex.
The case was eventually dismissed, but it still managed to catch the attention of another man, Mario Villegas, from Arizona, whose wife at the time had been prescribed abortion pills by a clinic in 2018, according to reporting by ProPublica. Villegas reached out to Magers’s lawyer, Brent Helms, and was put in touch with a local attorney. In 2020, he opened an estate in the name of “baby Villegas” and launched a copycat case, suing the clinic for wrongful death.
According to court records, the woman had told the clinic that her relationship with Villegas was unstable, and alleged that her then-husband had even accompanied her to some appointments. Although most of the counts have now been dismissed, the woman’s lawyers still declined to discuss the case on record, citing ongoing fears for her safety.
Experts warned at the time that lawsuits like these could become more common, and that they could be used by men to harass their ex-partners. As similar cases stack up in county courts and make their way into attorney generals’ statements, these predictions appear to be coming true.
The “abortion pill” is actually two separate pills: mifepristone and misoprostol. The first must be swallowed whole. Then, one or two days later, the misoprostol is taken, either dissolved in the cheek, under the tongue, or inserted into the vagina. After around one to four hours, the woman will begin to bleed, much like a miscarriage, and the pregnancy will end.
Misoprostol, which was originally developed in 1973 to treat peptic ulcers, was labeled as unsafe for pregnant women, as its side effects included miscarriage and uterine contractions. At some point in the late 1980s, women in Brazil—where abortion was and still is illegal—realized that these side effects could come in handy for ending unwanted pregnancies. A whisper network of sorts developed, and doctors soon noticed that the numbers of women coming to the emergency room with hemorrhaging and infections from unsafe home abortions had dramatically dropped.
Mifepristone, its sister drug, was developed in the 1980s by French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, with the express purpose of finding a safe, noninvasive alternative to surgical abortion. It was approved by the FDA in 2000. When taken together, the two medications are up to 98 percent effective at ending pregnancies up to eight weeks. Doctors are usually licensed to prescribe them only in the first trimester, although they can also work if taken later. Because misoprostol is used in treating other medical ailments, most of the current legal attacks are targeted at mifepristone.
Together, these two pills have transformed access to abortion, both across the United States and in other countries where women and pregnant people face restrictions to terminations. In 2005, the Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts launched the nonprofit Women on Web, the world’s first telemedicine abortion service, which ships the pills worldwide—including to countries where abortion is outlawed. Patients must first fill out an online consultation form, then a multilingual help desk guides them through the process. Multiple studies have found that telemedicine is just as safe and effective for providing care to women seeking medical abortions as in-person doctor visits. After the court of appeals briefly blocked the mailing of mifepristone in May, many remote providers pledged either to carry on providing the drug until the legislation played out or to switch to prescribing misoprostol only.
Despite this evidence, many countries resisted introducing telemedicine, concerned that in-person appointments were important safeguards for estimating gestational age. In the United States, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, women were required to collect the first of the two pills from a medical clinic. This all changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In April 2021, the Biden administration allowed women to access the pills remotely for the first time, siding with a judge’s ruling that the in-person laws were putting women in danger. Medical practitioners soon found that health outcomes were the same as when pills were dispensed in person. The policy was still in place when the Dobbs decision led to the overturn of Roe in the summer of 2022. Massachusetts quickly passed a “shield law,” which protects health care providers who send the medication across state lines, followed by California that September. Today, eight states have shield laws that include protections for telehealth providers. Collectives of activists and health providers—such as Aid Access, the U.S. offshoot of Women on Web—have partnered with clinicians and pharmacies in shield states to create services for women in red states.
Anti-abortion advocates are now coordinating multipronged attacks on the medication, providers, and those who may need to take it. Twenty-five Republican members of Congress have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether the drug could be contaminating the water supply, and Representative Mary Miller of Illinois has drafted legislation that would require women to use “catch kits” when using the drug to end a pregnancy, rather than flushing the remains away.
“We really need to approach this issue like we do the opioid crisis, where there is consensus that this is doing damage to individuals,” Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, told me on a Zoom call. “We actually have policies that are being completely ignored.” According to him, shield laws are “helping sabotage the enforcement of valid legislation in other jurisdictions.” Although he said he supports the various challenges to mifepristone that are being brought to the FDA, he also wants to see the dormant Comstock Act enforced—the same demand Mitchell makes in his lawsuits. “We have a federal piece of legislation that says mailing abortifacients is illegal, and the federal government has just decided not to enforce that law,” Seago explained.
The organization has put out calls on social media for women “harmed” by abortion, or those related to them, to launch civil suits against abortion providers. “We assist those who are seeking [these cases], make sure they’re connected with the right attorneys and legal resources,” he said, although he denied having assisted with any of the cases that have been brought to date. Because the shield laws make it hard for officials to bring criminal proceedings against providers, Seago believes civil cases are the best way forward.
He mentioned the cases brought by Mitchell’s plaintiffs Rodriguez and Davis as examples of how pills by mail can be used to force women into abortions against their will. “This is the kind of evil we are allowing when we say all that is required to get abortion pills in the mail is a credit card,” he said. “There’s no medical oversight.” He’s not the only anti-abortion advocate to cite such concerns. The Heritage Foundation has published reports on “abortion pills, coercion and abuse,” and the nationwide 40 Days for Life campaign has created an interactive map of “forced abortion scumbags,” tracking cases around the world where men have been prosecuted for administering abortion pills without consent.
I asked Seago what steps can be taken to ensure that these private suits are not abused by men to harass or humiliate their ex-partners. “We haven’t seen any of those types of cases,” he said. “We put in law that her name can’t be public, that her identifying information cannot be public in these cases, because we really want to make sure that the focus is never to do her harm.” Legal experts confirmed that Texas’s December 2025 bill, which allowed individuals to sue out-of-state pill providers, does indeed contain a clause that the woman cannot be named. They stressed, however, that this won’t necessarily stop cases from being weaponized by abusers. “The woman’s name is often likely to be leaked,” a spokesperson from the Center for Reproductive Rights said. “The media attention is part of the larger strategy to scare people away from accessing care.”
Around once or twice a week, Susan (not her real name), a 63-year-old retired ob-gyn, sits down at her Massachusetts kitchen table at around 7 a.m. and starts sifting through her emails, reviewing medical forms filled out by people from all over the United States who have requested abortion pills by mail. Some have come to her through a resource website such as Plan C, some through Reddit or ChatGPT, and some have even spotted a sticker pasted in a public bathroom. She checks their age—Massachusetts law dictates that the pills can be supplied only to those who are over 16—tries to understand how far along they are, and then reads through their medical history.
If all looks OK, she hits “approve.” Another team member then orders the pills from the pharmaceutical company, a different person processes the payment, and a fourth takes the discreet white envelope to the post office. Two weeks later, the patient will get a follow-up email to check whether everything’s OK and to gather feedback. The entire process is split between different individuals to make it harder to identify those involved. Some days, Susan might have a quiet shift; other days, she’s glued to her screen until bedtime.
Susan is one of five prescribing clinicians at The Map, a telemedicine abortion service founded by Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants shortly after Massachusetts passed its shield law in summer 2022. The name was purposefully chosen to be innocuous. The organization briefly switched to misoprostol-only prescriptions after May’s ruling, and will do the same in the face of any other challenges to the supply of mifepristone. “I’ve always provided abortions because I thought that was my job,” Susan said. She described Donald Trump’s first 2016 election, however, as “a bonk on the head that things were starting to look grim.”
Angel Foster, a professor at the University of Ottawa and The Map’s M.D., said the team has cared for almost 50,000 patients since officially launching in September 2023. Around one-third of these are in Texas. People don’t feel threatened by the recent lawsuits coming out of red states, Foster said. Rather, the media coverage has led to an increase in those seeking the services. “Suddenly more people realize that you can get an abortion this way in Texas,” she said. The multiple anti-abortion laws that Texas has introduced, and the hastiness with which some were written, mean that the team deals with patients confused about their rights and the legalities “every single day.” “For most people, when they hear that something is illegal, they think it’s illegal to do it, not that it’s just illegal to provide it,” she said.
The process is no different than when she was working in a brick-and-mortar clinic, Susan said. “In some ways it’s even more accessible,” she added, “because the clinics were often few and far between, and often had long waiting times.” Foster said that, while the profile of most patients is similar to what health care professionals have always seen, there has been an increase in inquiries from rural areas of red states, as well as from women who already have four or more children. “We think these folks were unable to get abortion care prior to Dobbs because they just couldn’t get to a clinic or couldn’t do multiple visits,” she said.
It’s standard for clinicians to ask screening questions to check whether the patient is ordering pills for themselves and is not being coerced. “I’m not looking them in the eye or seeing who they show up with, so maybe it’s a little harder to ascertain than before,” Susan said. “I would say the opposite scenario is far more common—they’re not allowed to seek an abortion even if they want one, or they’re being coerced into sex, or they’re having their birth control sabotaged.” A survey by The Map found that 8 percent of their patients had experienced intimate partner violence during the pregnancy they terminated. The team regularly receive thank-you messages from women telling them that the service helped them leave an abusive relationship.
Back in Texas, Sonia Corrales, the deputy CEO of the domestic violence nonprofit Houston Area Women’s Center, has seen multiple examples of the relationship between reproductive freedom and gender-based abuse throughout her 34-year career. “Every day we see how domestic abuse is about power and control,” she said. “We hear story after story where survivors are telling us their abusers are sabotaging their birth control, they’re forcing pregnancy through sexual violence.”
They also hear stories of survivors being forced into abortions they didn’t want, she said, but she stressed that it’s important to look at the overall picture. Abuse is about “preventing somebody from having control over their bodies or making choices about their bodies,” she said. “And when you have laws that remove any kind of access, then that dynamic is strengthened.” A landmark study on the life outcomes of abortion patients found that accessing terminations was associated with a long-term decrease in experiences of intimate partner violence, while carrying the pregnancy to term was not.
Jennifer Holland, the author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, explained that activists have always painted abortion as dangerous for women, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The idea of coerced abortion—be it at the hands of partners, families, or providers—has been present in their arguments for decades. “There’s a deep-rooted belief that motherhood is women’s God-ordained role,” she said. “It’s this idea that women always want to be mothers, and anything that interrupts that cannot have come from the woman herself.” The possibility that a woman could freely choose an abortion goes against core beliefs about who women are.
After the initial shock and uncertainty, the local district attorney confirmed that the state would not be pursuing criminal charges in Noyola and Carpenter’s case. The two friends countersued Silva for invasion of privacy. They were gearing up to face him in a criminal trial, set for October 2024, when he and Mitchell dropped the claim just a few days before proceedings were due to start. The relief that it was finally over was mixed with disappointment at not getting their day in court. “We wanted to put him in the losing chair—not just him, but all these losers and abusers—and be like, no, you are not going to win,” Noyola said. “It was pretty upsetting,” added Carpenter. “He just got to cause all that trouble for nothing.”
Although Garcia, who was named as a third co-defendant for having helped supply the pills, did not respond to a request for interview, she released a statement at the time. “I have been an abortion advocate and a resource to my community for over 10 years,” it read. “I don’t intend to ever abandon my cause or my home state of Texas no matter how much the state and others try to intimidate us.”
While life has mostly returned to normal for the two friends, one thing has irreversibly changed: their relationship with Lauren. As soon as proceedings started, the two were told by their lawyers to avoid contact with her—a standard process during litigation, to avoid the accidental creation of new evidence—and, if they did speak, to make sure the conversation was recorded. Lauren left their company soon after the lawsuit was dropped.
Although the pair’s case may be settled, the confusion over how and where to access an abortion remains a daily struggle for women in Texas. The patchwork of laws and various regulations is confusing at best, terrifying at worst. At one point in our conversation, Carpenter admitted that she almost stopped herself from Googling “Texas abortion laws” as we talked. “I was like, ‘Oh no, I probably shouldn’t do that,’” she said. “It’s these little things that affect you.” “It’s not just placing fear on the people who are obtaining it, it’s placing fear on the people helping provide it,” Noyola added. “I know of situations where people have had to go across the border into Mexico to take these pills or go to the doctor.”
Yet the women hope their case doesn’t scare others from helping a friend in need, and that women continue to be resourceful and to support one another. “Don’t let them win,” Noyola urged. “At the end of the day, I sleep well at night knowing I was a good friend,” Carpenter said. “I would do it all over again to get her to where she is now.”
