Texas DA Who Jailed Woman for Abortion Paid for One Himself
8.13.25
Click to skip ahead: In Aid Access Speaks Out, we spoke to provider Rebecca Gomperts about the suit just filed against her on Monday. Attacks on Abortion Pills features yet another letter from GOP AGs and a bonkers op-ed on the so-called ‘environmental impacts’ of abortion pills. Care Denied has updates on two cases involving critical care being denied to pregnant women—in California. You Love to See It shares a much-needed feel-good story reminding us that *we take care of each other*. Funding Crisis In Texas highlights abortion funds that need your help. Donor Hypocrisy looks at the brands and corporations funding Republican AGs. Finally, in Criminalizing Care, we meet the Texas prosecutor who jailed a woman over her abortion—after allegedly paying for one, himself.
Aid Access Speaks Out
On Monday, we reported that Aid Access and its founder, physician Rebecca Gomperts, were the targets of a ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit: Anti-abortion attorney Jonathan Mitchell is representing a woman who says her ex-partner spiked a drink with abortion medication that was shipped from Aid Access.
Today, Abortion, Every Day spoke to Gomperts about the suit, and how conservatives are feigning concern over domestic abuse to further restrict abortion. “Anti-abortion groups are using people in tragic situations, vulnerable situations, and weaponizing them for their political aims,” Gomperts says, “and that is disgusting.”
The Aid Access provider says this is all a cynical play by the anti-abortion movement to manipulatively equate abortion access with abuse and terrorize providers into abandoning patients in need—patients, she stressed, who are often abuse victims.
In fact, Gomperts notes that for patients in abusive relationships, abortion pills are a lifeline because of the privacy it affords them: the medication allows them to conceal an abortion from partners who might otherwise force them to remain pregnant.
Research backs that up: the National Domestic Violence Hotline saw calls involving reproductive coercion double after Dobbs, with hundreds of victims telling the group about partners threatening to sue or call the police if they had abortions. It’s a scenario that happens far more often than an abuser slipping a woman abortion medication—but attorneys like Mitchell are latching onto those small handful of stories, manipulating them, and using them to strip away crucial access.
The fact that it’s Mitchell, of all people, pretending to care about domestic abuse is especially stomach-churning: over the last couple years, the anti-abortion extremist has carved out a terrifying niche of representing aggrieved men to sue over their partners’ alleged abortions. (The end-goal is a court battle that stops out-of-state providers from mailing abortion pills into banned states and revives the Comstock Act.)
Gomperts says the suit against her is about fear-mongering, plain and simple. It’s about “making people afraid to seek or provide abortion care.” She says that there should be dozens of organizations like Aid Access, but anti-abortion groups have successfully terrified too many people who otherwise might help:
“Fear is the ultimate self-censorship.”
Gomperts tells AED she isn’t certain what Mitchell’s lawsuit means for her in the Netherlands, but that Aid Access’ services are continuing—and, if anything, they’re trying to reach more people who may need their care.
So you know what to do: Click here to support Aid Access, here to order abortion medication from the group, and read our recent explainer about conservatives’ attempts to ban abortion by co-opting ‘coercion’.
No one else is connecting the dots like Abortion, Every Day. But we really do need your support to do this work! So if you’re not a paying member, please consider upgrading your subscription tonight.
Attacks on Abortion Pills
Where do they find the time?
Just weeks after sending a letter to congressional lawmakers asking them to repeal shield laws, a group of Republican attorneys general have teamed up again to write yet another letter attacking abortion rights. This time, 22 AGs have written to HHS Secretary RFK Jr. and FDA head Martin Makary, demanding that they reinstate dated, medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion pills—and consider “withdrawing mifepristone from the market” entirely.
Predictably enough, the letter cites the bullshit “study” from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) that claims abortion pills are unsafe. AED already thoroughly debunked everything wrong with that study—and there was a lot! We even uncovered videos of EPPC president Ryan Anderson admitting that the goal of the so-called research is the “elimination” of abortion pills.
There’s a reason why Republicans are targeting abortion medication this aggressively: The majority of abortions in the U.S. are provided with pills, and 1 in 4 are provided via tele-health. If the FDA restores pre-2016 rules on mifepristone—as the letter demands—patients would be required to have in-person visits with providers, devastating access for those in banned states.
Which, of course, is the point! This has nothing to do with women’s safety.
To find out more about attacks on abortion pills, click here, here and here.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t get any more desperate and absurd than this: the Washington Examiner is running an op-ed from Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins and conservative energy policy advocate Chris Johnson, who claim that abortion pills—but somehow not the fossil fuel industry—are polluting the environment.
Their column builds on an escalating anti-abortion strategy that AED has been tracking closely: Hawkins and her cohort insist that abortion medication and fetal remains from the pills are filling dumpsters and sewage systems. Never mind that the EPA performed an environmental impact analysis before approving the medication nearly 30 years ago and found… no impact. Still, Hawkins and Johnson write:
“[Abortion pills] are taken at home and often flushed down the toilet or tossed in the trash, along with the baby that the drugs starve to death…together with chemically tainted placenta tissue and blood. Water treatment plants don’t filter these drugs out, meaning a rapidly rising amount of chemicals ends up in rivers and lakes with unknown effects…To protect abortion, environmentalists abandon their own standards.” (Emphasis ours)
This is utterly bonkers—do they think that miscarriages, too, are tainting our waterways? Or is just the mifepristone and fetal remains from women who wanted to end their pregnancies?
As absurd as it all is—I mean, these are the people who claim Americans are “drinking abortions”—it’s important to keep an eye on. Especially with conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. running the Health and Human Services Department. For more on the growing strategy, read AED’s past coverage below:
Care Denied
We have two legal updates today in cases where women were denied vital healthcare over so-called ‘religious freedom’—and both stories come to us from California! (A good reminder that living in a pro-choice state doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the care you need.)
First up, do you remember the Catholic hospital in California that denied a woman miscarriage care when her water broke 15 weeks into her pregnancy? Anna Nusslock filed a suit against Providence St. Joseph Hospital for their treatment—or lack thereof. (Seriously: nurses handed her a bucket and towels for the car ride to another hospital “in case something happens in the car.”)
The hospital eventually agreed to comply with California’s Emergency Services Law, and allow emergency abortion care decisions to be left to its doctors. But now, the hospital is trying to modify or potentially back out of that agreement—demanding that the agreement comply with the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.”
You guessed it: that’s a set of rules written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to govern medical practices within Catholic institutions—rules that clearly state, “Abortion is never permitted.”
Naturally, California Attorney General Rob Bonta is calling on the court to uphold and enforce the existing agreement. The next hearing in this case is on August 29, and we’ll make sure to keep you updated.
But we just have to say: it’s sickening that, over and over, religious hospitals are willing to go to war over their supposed right to deny patients life-saving care—all over their anti-abortion ideologies. For more on the impact of religious hospitals, read below:
The second update we have for you is a bit more positive: A California woman who was denied misoprostol while miscarrying has settled her lawsuit against CVS.
In 2023, Angela Costales—who had just spent 10 hours in the emergency room and was still reeling from painful abdominal cramping—went to her local pharmacy to pick up the misoprostol she needed to safely complete her pregnancy loss. But the pharmacist there repeatedly refused to provide the medication—telling Costales and her husband to “just Google” where else they could access the medication, and to “just look it up on your phone.”
In a lawsuit brought by the National Women’s Law Center, Costales accused CVS of violating state and federal discrimination laws, and demanded that the company “immediately [stop] its unlawful practice of denying necessary medical care to customers, so that the pain she experienced never happens to anyone else.”
This week, CVS privately settled the dispute—and we sincerely hope Costales was generously compensated.
Unfortunately, what she experienced wasn’t an isolated incident: we’ve heard stories like this many times over, even before Roe was overturned. And over the last three years, powerful conservative legal organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Thomas More Society are trying to clear the way for more pharmacists, doctors, and other healthcare providers, to keep denying care and medication they don’t agree with.
ADF is representing a Minnesota pharmacist right now, for example, who refused to give a woman emergency contraception. And remember the woman in Tennessee who was refused prenatal care because she was pregnant and unmarried? That was also thanks to Republicans’ so-called ‘religious freedom’ protections.
And this isn’t just happening on the state level: In President Trump’s first term, his administration shored up ‘religious freedom’ protections to allow health providers to impose their personal beliefs on women seeking pregnancy-related care.
You Love To See It
We’re not done with the difficult news yet, but we could probably all use a palate-cleanser to help get through the rest of the newsletter. This video from a clinic escort in North Carolina absolutely made my day—and I think you’ll feel the same. We need more of this energy in the world:
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Funding Crisis in Texas
It can’t be said enough: At the same time that corporations are guzzling shocking amounts of money to anti-abortion PACs (more on that in the next section), abortion funds across the country are struggling. There’s no better example than what’s happening in Texas, where costs have spiked while donations dwindle. Reporter Mary Tuma details that crisis in the Texas Observer this week, interviewing activists from multiple Texas funds who all say the same thing: they can’t keep up with the demand.
“It’s not as if the attacks on abortion have slowed down in Texas, we still deeply need investment, possibly now more than ever,” says Lucie Arvallo, executive director of Jane’s Due Process.
There’s also deep frustration over where abortion rights dollars are going: Funds say donors are increasingly giving to political campaigns, ballot initiatives, and clinics in pro-choice states, regarding the South, Tuma writes, as “a futile investment.”
From Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice:
“The irony of that logic to me is that you would think the groups that have withstood so many attacks on abortion and found a way to remain resilient and still standing would be the ones you would want to invest in.”
In addition to Fund Texas Choice and Jane’s Due Process, the Observer also spoke to the Texas Equal Access Fund, the Frontera Fund, and the Lilith Fund—all of which could use your help.
Donor Hypocrisy
Popular Information has an infuriating new report highlighting major brands and companies’ staggering donations to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Mind you, these are the same attorneys general who are banding together to write near-daily letters calling on Congress and the Trump administration to effectively ban abortion pills. And several of these AGs—like Louisiana’s Liz Murrill and Texas’ Ken Paxton—are trying to punish and extradite shield state doctors for mailing abortion pills.
So far this year alone, United Healthcare, Pfizer, Cigna, and CVS have together donated $310,000 to RAGA. Airbnb and Zillow have donated $25,000 to RAGA each. Anschutz Corporation, the parent company behind Coachella, has donated $100,000; DoorDash, Amazon, and Target have each donated $125,000.
Especially gross? Some of these companies, like Amazon, will try to pose as allies to women by offering to help cover some of the costs for traveling out-of-state for abortion. Or consider CVS, which has made a big show in recent years—amid the steady and increasing popularity of abortion—about dispensing abortion pills.
But by helping elect the anti-abortion extremists responsible for trampling our rights, these companies are just putting tiny band-aids on the enormous, open wounds that they’re creating.
Criminalizing Care
Speaking of hypocrisy: The Texas district attorney who charged a woman with murder in 2022 for self-managing an abortion appears to have actually paid for an abortion himself years earlier.
If you don’t remember this story, it’s truly shocking: Lizelle Gonzalez, then Herrera, was jailed for two nights and wrongfully charged with murder for inducing an abortion at 19 weeks. (Also alarming: Gonzalez was subjected to a c-section to complete the termination of her pregnancy instead of being provided a procedural abortion.)
Last year, Gonzalez sued prosecutors and the Starr County sheriff for $1 million in damages. But—as if what they put her through isn’t enough—county officials have been trying to dismiss the lawsuit, citing “immunity” as law enforcement.
On Monday, Gonzalez and the ACLU asked a federal court to deny these dismissal requests. And in this new brief, Gonzalez’s attorneys point out that Starr County District Attorney Gocha Ramirez must have known that self-inducing an abortion isn’t a crime—because he allegedly paid for an abortion in the 1990s while having extramarital affairs with two sisters. (!!)
At the time of Gonzalez’s arrest, Texas’ S.B. 8 abortion ban was in effect—but that law was enforced civilly, not criminally. But as the ACLU noted, the issue isn’t just the legal details:
“[Gonzalez’s] arrest on a homicide charge was highly publicized and deeply traumatizing. She spent three days in jail, away from her children, before the $500,000 bond was posted for her release. As a result of the false accusation and wrongful arrest, Lizelle Gonzalez’s life has been forever changed.”
By contrast, Ramirez only had to pay a small fine and one-year suspension. “Without real accountability,” the ACLU argues, local law enforcement “will not be deterred from abusing their power to unlawfully target people because of their personal beliefs.”
If you’re a regular reader you know that pregnancy criminalization is on the rise: AED has published story after story of women whose names have been dragged through the mud, or who’ve had their mugshots splashed across local crime pages. Gonzalez’s lawsuit presents a real opportunity to discourage these abuses from law enforcement, and to protect women like her across the country.
Thank you so much for doing the hard work and reporting all this horrifying news everyday. I have a difficult time just reading it, so I can imagine how infuriating it must be to research, interview, and write this newsletter everyday. But because of your efforts, we have a much better idea of what is going on and the impact. Happy to support your work and this newsletter.
I love the story from that volunteer. How nice to have a reminder that bright spots exist!