Texas Case Shows How Abortion Bans Facilitate Domestic Abuse

Texas Case Shows How Abortion Bans Facilitate Domestic Abuse
5/10/2023 by Carrie N. Baker and Lisa Aronson Fontes
The Silva case illustrates how abortion bans add another weapon to an abuser’s controlling arsenal.



Medication abortion typically uses two FDA-approved oral medications to end a pregnancy: mifepristone and misoprostol. The organization Plan C has a comprehensive guide to finding abortion pills on their website. (Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images)

Court records and police reports indicate that the Texas man who recently sued his wife’s friends for helping her obtain an abortion has a long history of coercively controlling her. Coercive control is a type of domestic abuse that can include isolation, manipulation, monitoring, intimidation and verbal, legal, physical and sexual abuse. The goal is to dominate the partner. Coercive contol often includes depriving the partner of resources such as money and friends. The Texas case is an example of how abortion bans give domestic abusers an additional way to control and harass their partners.

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Last week, two of the friends, Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter, countersued Silva for invasion of privacy for reading their private messages to Brittni Silva without her permission. Silva reported her husband had a history of abusive behavior, including burning their wedding photos and threatening the family dog. She once called the police because he was harassing her. The facts that have emerged in the Silva case appear to be a classic pattern of coercive control. Several states now have laws against coercive control, including California, Hawaii, Colorado, and Connecticut. Other states are considering similar laws, including New York and Massachusetts, where a proposal to ban abusive litigation is also currently under consideration. Several countries, including Scotland, France, England, Wales and Ireland, have adopted coercive control laws over the last decade.

Legal abuse can be a component of coercive control. This is where someone uses the courts to harass, intimidate, threaten, control, coerce, impoverish, or maintain contact with their victim. Examples include knowingly filing false claims of child abuse, filing frivolous motions related to child custody, or bringing claims with no legal or factual basis. Legal abuse costs survivors time and money, and subjects them to the emotional trauma of repeatedly and unnecessarily having to face off against their abuser in court. Silva’s lawsuit appears to be a form of legal abuse, using this lawsuit to coercively control Brittni Silva and her friends.

A key tactic of coercive control is isolating a victim from friends and family. S.B. 8 and lawsuits like Silva’s attempt to do just that–cut women off from supporters who might help them access reproductive health care in times of crisis when they need it most. More generally, abortion bans give coercively controlling men more power to abuse the women in their lives with threats to turn them over to the police or sue people who support them in obtaining an abortion.. Threats to turn a woman over to the police, or sue her friends and family members if they help her obtain an abortion is reproductive coercion, aided by the state. The Silva case illustrates how this state coercion adds another weapon to an abuser’s controlling arsenal.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/05/10/texas-man-sue-wife-abortion-pills-coercive-control-domestic-abuse/