Texas Woman Files Wrongful Death Suit, Alleges Man Slipped Abortion Pills in Her Drink

A Texas woman filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court on Monday against a man who she alleges “secretly dissolv[ed] abortion pills” into a hot chocolate and tricked her into drinking it.

The woman is represented by former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, who was the architect of the Texas bounty hunter abortion ban, SB 8. Prominent anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson—who has worked with Mitchell for years on an initiative to convince local governments to pass ordinances declaring themselves “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” —announced the case on social media. Autonomy News has chosen not to name the woman and man involved in the case.

Dickson wrote on multiple social platforms that he heard about the incident in May from the director of a local crisis pregnancy center while visiting Corpus Christi, Texas, to speak about his “sanctuary city” campaign and SB 2880, a bill that would have instituted a broad crackdown on abortion pills in Texas. (Most CPCs are not bound by medical privacy laws like HIPAA.) That bill failed to advance during the regular legislative session, but similar legislation has been introduced in the state’s dramatic special session, which made national news when Democratic legislators fled the state in a last-ditch attempt to stop Congressional redistricting. There are multiple proposed bills that would institute civil penalties of $100,000 or more for helping people access abortions. Dickson noted online that lawmakers were hearing one such proposal on Monday, Senate Bill 6. He connected the lawsuit to this bill: “I hope these stories drive us to see more protections pass.”

The suit also names Aid Access and its founder, physician Rebecca Gomperts, alleging that Aid Access was the source of the pills. (The woman alleges that the man showed her a receipt from Aid Access on his phone.) She is seeking damages from Aid Access, Gomperts, and her male partner for wrongful death.

Under Texas’ wrongful death and felony murder statutes, the definition of an individual “includes an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” In other words, fetal personhood is enshrined into Texas law. The suit also claims the defendants violated the Comstock Act, a dormant 1873 anti-vice law. Mitchell has been a leading voice within the anti-abortion movement in favor of enforcing Comstock in such a way that it would ban sending abortion pills by mail entirely.

Currently, clinicians working for services like Aid Access can mail abortion pills to residents of any state under so-called “shield laws” that protect them from civil and criminal action in states with bans. Mitchell and other conservatives are trying to undermine if not overturn those laws. Also on Monday, a research letter in JAMA found that Aid Access prescribed nearly 120,000 sets of abortion pills between July 2023 and August 2024. Almost 100,000 were sent to states that either ban the procedure or prohibit the mailing of pills.

Recently, Mitchell has been representing aggrieved men to sue over their partners’ and ex-partners’ abortions. This is the first known case where he has represented a woman alleging she was given abortion-inducing medications without her consent.

According to text messages included in the complaint, the man pressured the woman, who is his next door neighbor, to have an abortion after she told him she was pregnant. She repeatedly said she did not want to have an abortion, and told him not to order abortion pills. He also threatened to testify against her in an ongoing custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband, who the complaint alleges is physically and emotionally abusive toward the woman and her two children.

According to the complaint, amid their ongoing conflict over the pregnancy, the man suggested a “trust building night” spent together in April 2025. She alleges that he slipped misoprostol into a hot chocolate that he made her, and that she began bleeding and cramping within 30 minutes. Misoprostol can either be used in combination with another medication, mifepristone, or on its own to induce abortion. However, misoprostol is typically dissolved in the cheek, under the tongue, or in the vagina rather than swallowed. Abortion patients are also told to take four pills at a time, and the dose is typically repeated several times depending on the gestational age of the pregnancy and the medications being used.

After offering to drive her to the hospital and pick up her mother so she could care for the younger children, the woman alleges the man left her home, never returned, and stopped answering her calls. The complaint further alleges that she found a pill bottle and box left behind at her home with the man’s name listed on the prescription label, and that the man had mixed 10 of the 12 misoprostol pills he received into her hot chocolate.

The woman brought the pill bottle and box with her to the emergency room and turned them over to the police, according to the lawsuit. Medical staff told her she lost the eight-week pregnancy. There is currently no medical test that can confirm whether or not someone took misoprostol, or whether it caused a miscarriage.

The circumstances described in the lawsuit bear close resemblance to the case of a North Texas man who is facing capital murder charges for allegedly slipping mifepristone into his girlfriend’s food. A local sheriff’s office pressed those charges. Experts have also warned that that case represents a dangerous advance of the legal theory of fetal personhood.

Late last month, Mitchell filed a wrongful death lawsuit against a California doctor for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a Texas man’s girlfriend, who is reportedly pregnant again. In that case, Mitchell asked a judge to prevent the physician from prescribing more abortion pills, and to force the doctor to pay damages for wrongful death. Though Aid Access is mentioned in that complaint, the organization is not named as a defendant.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

This story was edited by Susan Rinkunas.