A legal expert gave an eyebrow-raising opinion on a controversial effort in Texas, where the state's far-right attorney general last week sued a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a woman in suburban Dallas.
MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin shared a startling update to the lawsuit from Ken Paxton against an abortion provider after a woman lost her pregnancy.
Rubin wrote on X that the suit came from the boyfriend, who was assumed to be the father of the "unborn," and said he believed the woman did something that led to the loss of the pregnancy.
"As we discussed on @Morning_Joe today, part of what's so chilling about Ken Paxton's lawsuit against a New York OB/GYN is how it likely came to be: through a patient's boyfriend with an apparent 'your body, my choice' vendetta," wrote Rubin.
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Jessica Valenti, who follows laws around reproductive freedom, posted a screen capture of the lawsuit from Paxton, which explains that the angry boyfriend found medications from a New York doctor.
"If you read Paxton's brief, it's clear that the patient's boyfriend is the protagonist - it's all about him," Valenti wrote on X. "This is what happened when a doc mentioned that the patient had lost a pregnancy (she hadn't told her boyfriend)."
The suit reads: "The biological father of the unborn, upon learning this information, concluded that the biological mother of the unborn child had intentionally withheld information from him regarding her pregnancy, and he further suspected that the biological mother had, in fact, done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child. The biological father, upon returning to the residence in Collin County, discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter."
Valenti wrote that the man's immediate reaction to the news was to be "angry and suspicious - and head to her place to look for evidence of an abortion."
She referred to him as an example of "aggrieved men."
"All of which is to say: Texas Republicans want this to look like a case where they're protecting women from dangerous abortion pills and irresponsible doctors. But scratch at the surface even a little, and you can see that it's plain old controlling misogyny," said Valenti.
She predicted similar lawsuits would likely surface over the next few years. It's critical, she argued, to ensure careful investigation before reporting something like a woman having "abortion complications" when the reality is something entirely different.
Valenti wrote a report on the way Texas concealed abortion data last year. In the Texas abortion ban, there are 28 medical issues the state considers to be "abortion complications." However, medically, they have nothing to do with abortions. Regardless, Texas requires doctors to input false information so the state can inaccurately claim "any woman who develops one of these issues" is because she had an abortion earlier in life.
For example, if a woman died as a result of ectopic pregnancy and she had an abortion 10 years before that, Texas would deem that "abortion complications."
"Some, like 'adverse reactions to anesthesia,' are risks associated with having any medical procedure," wrote Valeti.
In Texas, this would be categorized as "abortion complications." Another is a "hemolytic reaction resulting from the administration of ABO-incompatible blood or blood products." If a woman dies as a result of being given the wrong blood type, it would also be deemed "abortion complications."