THE NOTORIOUS FAR-RIGHT attorney who helped craft Texas’s bounty-hunter abortion ban, Senate Bill 8, is now attempting to force abortion funds to hand over reams of information on every abortion the organizations have supported since 2021. This includes the city and state where each patient lived, the names of the abortion providers, and the identities of nearly every person who helped the patients access abortion care.
Earlier this month, Jonathan Mitchell — himself not a Texan but based in Washington state — served requests to nine Texas abortion funds and one Texas doctor. The brazen attempt to acquire sensitive information about abortion patients and the funds that assist them is a disturbing turn in the ongoing legal battle over Texas’s six-week abortion ban.
In August of last year, a coalition of abortion funds and doctors filed a class action lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other state officials. The suit, Fund Texas Choice v. Paxton, aims to challenge Senate Bill 8, or S.B. 8, and its devious method of civil enforcement to evade federal court scrutiny. In response, Mitchell, on behalf of the Texas government, is using the legal discovery process to harass those defending reproductive freedoms.
Hellbound and Down 