They Helped a Friend Seeking an Abortion. Her Ex Sued Them for $1 Million Each.

The group chat was called “Bebes,” followed by three emojis: ????????????‍♀️. Amy Carpenter met Jess Silva first. They became friends, and by 2021, coworkers at the Houston company employing Carpenter. Jackie Noyola was hired around the same time as Jess, whose first name has been changed here to protect her privacy. On and off the clock, the trio bonded. They didn’t just watch the same TV shows or read the same books; they pressed play at the same time, watching in sync from their respective homes and dressing up, with some other coworkers, as women from The Handmaid’s Tale for Halloween. They celebrated birthdays, took trips together, hung out with Jess and Carpenter’s kids, and stayed in constant contact.

Often, they texted about Jess’s troubled marriage. “Y’all have been a rock for me,” Jess wrote at one point. “You’ve helped me know what I am worth and I am thankful for it.” By May 2022, Jess filed for divorce. She shared two kids and a house with Marcus Silva, and they were still living together when, two months later, Jess took a pregnancy test. It was positive. She appeared to be early in her first trimester. The other Bebes rallied around her: They sent messages of support (“mistakes happen, you can’t spiral”), gave her a little bit of tough love (“stop fucking Marcus…I know you know that—but I can’t leave it unsaid”), and tried to help her figure out her options.

A month after the divorce was finalized, in March 2023, Jess’s ex-husband Marcus filed a wrongful death lawsuit. Using photos taken of exchanges in the Bebes text thread as evidence, he sought $1,000,000 in damages from both Noyola and Carpenter over Jess’s alleged abortion. This first-of-its-kind lawsuit to be filed post-Dobbs may be a bellwether in the fight over reproductive rights.

In the four years since the Dobbs decision was handed down, the national abortion rate hasn’t significantly dropped in the way the anti-abortion movement hoped, thanks largely to the availability of abortion pills. Since they have so far failed in their attempts to nationally outlaw medication abortion, the movement has dialed up the pressure on individuals who help others secure abortions. This case offers an inside look at the bruising battleground that’s testing relationships and financially incentivizing people to report or sue over suspected abortions. But can this strategy win? And why might losing still represent a victory for the anti-abortion movement?

Whether abortion is legal or not, social support is often critical in securing one. Four years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion across the country, Nancy Howell Lee’s The Search for an Abortionist tracked how 114 women found providers. One woman called more than 20 friends before finding a lead. Another had no one to ask, but was crying in the bathroom at work when a coworker found her and offered help. They asked people they knew (parents, boyfriends, doctors) or turned to those they barely did (hairdressers, bartenders, taxi drivers). “I called up this girl I had seen at a party once and said, ‘You don’t know me, but.…’ She hung up on me,” one woman said.

Many subjects traveled extensively, sometimes to states where abortion was legal, but when asked their most important reason for choosing the abortion provider they used, the most common answer was “no choice, only one located.” One woman, in discussing her decision-making process, said “the question was never should I get an abortion, but would I be able to find someone safe.”

Roe emerged from a Texas case, but even before the Supreme Court overturned it, abortion was almost entirely banned in Texas. In July 2022, when Jess took a pregnancy test in Houston, Dobbs had just been handed down, but even more restrictive “trigger laws,” which increased civil and criminal penalties for providing an abortion with punishments up to life in prison, weren’t yet in effect. Jess called a hotline and learned she could get referrals to out-of-state abortion clinics several hundred miles away. “Wishing it was available here so I could take a day and get it done,” Jess wrote on the Bebes thread in July 2022. “Now there is so much more involved.” (Through a lawyer, she declined an interview and court filings say her “position is that none of the alleged conduct on her part, even if true, amounts to a criminal act.”)

Noyola, trying to help, seems to have found someone more informed, and then texted the Bebes screenshots of her messages with this unnamed contact. She asked her contact if getting abortion pills, also known as medication abortion, via a telehealth visit would be safe, and if the pills would be sent to Texas or if getting them required flying out of state to pick them up. Noyola’s contact said the pills could be ordered online via Aid Access, an organization that sends abortion pills by mail in the United States, though the source noted that “the legality of having them shipped here is murky.” Ordering pills online wasn’t the only option, the contact explained—“we have pills here in Houston.”

One of the biggest differences between the post-Dobbs landscape and the pre-Roe one is the emergence of medication abortion. “The equation of legality with safety, and illegality with danger, has been upended by self-managed abortion with pills,” Sydney Calkin writes in Abortion Pills Go Global, on their usage in countries with some of the most restrictive abortion laws.

First introduced in Europe in the late ’80s, medication abortion was approved for use in the U.S. by the FDA in 2000, but was accessible only via an in-person visit to an approved clinic or a hospital or under the direct supervision of a certified medical professional. But in the years before Dobbs, as abortions became increasingly inaccessible, people turned to the web for solutions. One analysis published in The New York Times in 2015 showed thousands of internet searches for phrases including “how to have a miscarriage,” “how to self-abort,” “buy abortion pills online,” and “how to do a coat hanger abortion.”

Under the Biden administration, the FDA temporarily lifted the in-person requirement for accessing medication abortion during the pandemic, paving the way for telehealth prescriptions, then made the change permanent, and further reduced restrictions on accessing it. Without leaving home, patients could do a telehealth appointment to get a prescription and then have it mailed to them. Such changes also brought dispensation of medication abortion in line with other drugs that don’t need to be taken in the presence of a doctor. Despite fearmongering, medication abortion, which has been studied for decades, is widely considered safe and effective—so much so that the World Health Organization suggested it can be self-managed up to 12 weeks under certain circumstances.

“We can take the day off and do it at my place if you want,” Noyola texted on the Bebes thread. Carpenter also offered up her place. “I’m so lucky to have y’all,” Jess wrote.

“She’s getting them at 8/830 tonight so I’ll have to meet her after that,” Noyola texted the Bebes thread, apparently about meeting her contact. The pills would be free. Then Noyola wrote, “Delete all conversations from today,” before adding, “You don’t want him looking through it,” referring to Jess’s ex, Marcus.

If Jess did follow Noyola’s advice, she wasn’t fast enough. On July 12, according to a police report reproduced in legal filings, Marcus went into his wife’s purse, found a Post-it note with an abortion hotline written on it, then went through her phone, discovering text messages “between his wife and several other people planning out the purchase and delivery of the abortion,” the officer wrote. (Multiple requests for interviews with Marcus, through his lawyers, were not granted or not responded to.)

According to Marcus’s report to the police, the next day, he rifled through her bag again and found a pill, then used an online pill identifier, which said it was “the first pill used in the abortion process.” According to a text sent by Jess—one that appeared in court documents, but not Silva’s filings—she’d hidden the pill in the wrapping of a panty liner in her purse. Almost a week later, Marcus went to a police office and filed a report. The officer wrote that Marcus “was upset that [Jess] did not at least have this conversation with him,” and was mad at those helping his wife because of the possibility of complications. According to Silva’s legal filings, the Galveston DA had already announced that Jess would not face criminal prosecution.

Between 2000 and 2020, If/When/How, a nonprofit dedicated to reproductive justice, found 61 cases of individuals “criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else do so.” The risk of sharing information about an abortion is clear: 26 percent of the cases came to the attention of law enforcement because an intimate acquaintance—a friend, parent, or partner—reported the pregnant person to authorities. Many of the cases involved people who’d self-managed their own abortion, usually by ordering pills online, but over a quarter of cases were centered on people investigated or arrested for helping someone else. In multiple instances, text messages between friends have served as evidence for arrest warrants or criminal trials.

In March 2023, a month after the Silva divorce was finalized, Carpenter and Noyola were at lunch when Carpenter saw an email from someone offering to represent them in Marcus’s lawsuit. She slid her phone across the table for Noyola to read. At first, they thought it was a prank perpetrated by Marcus.

But after consulting with other coworkers, they quickly realized Marcus had in fact filed a wrongful death suit demanding $1,000,000 in damages from each of them. A photo of their Handmaid’s Tale halloween costumes was included in his court filing as evidence they’d “celebrated the murder,” according to his attorneys. During multiple video calls last September, which Noyola and Carpenter wanted to do together, the pair told me their story.

After getting the email making them aware of the lawsuit, they didn’t return to the office for long. To avoid being served, which starts the countdown clock on a legal response, the pair ended up in hiding, as they described it, for a few weeks. At the time, Carpenter lived in a gated community, and while it’s easy enough to slip in behind an Amazon delivery truck, the gate offered more security than Noyola had in the apartment building where she lived. On Saturday, Noyola packed a bag and went to stay at Carpenter’s.

Carpenter was newly married, but has three children from a previous relationship, so in order to avoid the risk of being served at her kids’ schools, the oldest, then 16, took over school drop-offs and pickups for the younger ones. She told her kids that everything was fine, but they could no longer open the door of their house if someone knocked.

Every few days, Noyola would sneak back home to grab a few belongings, then return to Carpenter’s. While working remotely, they tried to find a lawyer. Some of the first attorneys they spoke to said they would not represent the pair together. “It was like, ‘Oh, shit. Well, what do you mean?’” Carpenter recalled. Noyola, sitting next to her, turned back to me and said, “See? The codependency had already started.”

If Noyola had greater involvement in the alleged abortion because she allegedly helped obtain the pills herself, the two defendants might have different legal interests in the lawsuit. Several times, Noyola told Carpenter that she thought it would work out better for Carpenter if they didn’t share representation. But Carpenter wouldn’t hear of it. “It was never an option for me,” she said firmly.

Carpenter had no interest in being pitted against one another, and she disputed the idea that they were any different. “We both made the decision to support our friend,” she said. “For me, it didn’t matter who wanted to pick that apart [and say,] ‘Well, what you did was worse than what you did.’”

Texas’s wrongful death statute was expanded in 2003 to include the death of an “unborn child” beginning at fertilization. Marcus’s lawsuit made the controversial claim that “a person who assists a pregnant woman in obtaining a self-managed abortion has committed the crime of murder and can be sued for wrongful death.” As a legal historian of reproduction policies in the U.S., Mary Ziegler puts it, the suit essentially argues that “there is no such thing as a self-managed abortion.”

If/When/How’s legal defense fund provided funding for Noyola and Carpenter’s attorneys, who agreed to accept service on their behalf (which meant they stopped hiding) and represent them together. By the time Marcus filed his lawsuit, Noyola and Carpenter weren’t as close with Jess, and once they had lawyers, the pair were advised not to speak to Jess at all.

Noyola and Carpenter countersued Marcus, claiming invasion of privacy (over how he’d accessed the Bebes texts, allegedly in violation of Texas’s digital privacy laws) and disputing his legal claims on a number of grounds. Marcus, in turn, denied the allegations made in the counterclaim.

In Texas, it’s illegal to provide an abortion (with the narrow exception of if the mother’s life is at risk), but not to self-administer one. The countersuit argues that it is “not illegal or wrongful for a woman to terminate her own pregnancy,” and therefore it’s also “not illegal or wrongful to help a friend do something she is legally permitted to do.”’

In the countersuit, Noyola and Carpenter used the police report to argue Marcus hadn’t recently found out about the alleged abortion, as his suit claimed, but knew in advance. According to the countersuit, Jess allegedly self-administered the abortion medication on July 14, the day after Marcus reported discovering a pill in her purse. Noyola and Carpenter allege that Marcus wasn’t interested in stopping an abortion, instead, he wanted evidence that he could leverage against Jess.

Jess’s friends weren’t the only targets. The third defendant was Aracely Garcia, a professional organizer in Texas’s reproductive justice movement. The suit alleged Noyola “arranged for the delivery” of abortion pills for Jess via Garcia. Responding to the lawsuit, Garcia denied “each and every allegation,” per a filing, and while they did grant me an interview, they declined to discuss specifics of the allegations.

According to the Bebes texts in Marcus’s lawsuit, Noyola shared a screenshot with the other Bebes of part of her conversation with Garcia, who requested they continue the conversation via Signal, an encrypted messaging app, since “it’s safer for both of us.” In the Bebes thread, Noyola shared other screenshots of communications with the contact, but there is no name or phone number visible in the screenshots of those messages, and it’s not clear from the messages exactly who she is talking to.

As someone who works in the reproductive justice movement in Texas, Garcia was already well aware of the lead attorney representing Marcus. Jonathan Mitchell is regarded as the mastermind behind Texas’s SB8, the so-called “bounty hunter” law that banned abortion after six weeks, which was one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country when it went into effect in 2021. SB8 allows any private citizen to sue doctors, abortion clinic employees, or anyone else who helped perform or arrange an abortion for $10,000 per procedure. Leaving enforcement entirely up to private individuals prevented abortion providers from successfully suing the state to overturn the law since government officials were not enforcing it. SB8 has resulted in the widespread cessation of abortion services across the state, increased requests for sterilization, denied or delayed care for pregnancy complications, and a “dramatic rise” in maternal mortality.

Things had been going well for Garcia before the lawsuit. They were engaged to be married and even tapering off an anti-anxiety medication. “As soon as it happened, it kind of felt like I was back at square one,” they told me. For months, they were afraid to leave their home, and, like Noyola and Carpenter, worried they might lose their job because of the publicity around the suit. Unsure of what the future held, Garcia asked their lawyer if they should postpone their wedding, but were advised to continue living their life as much as possible.

Marcus attempted to subpoena a wide swath of personal records from Jess, but doing so cast a harsh spotlight back on him. Because Jess wasn’t a defendant in Silva’s suit against the other Bebes, he used a subpoena to try to access more of her personal information and texts. Jess’s legal response called Marcus’s subpoena “the latest abusive tactic in a long line of steps he has taken to harass and control” her and claimed he’d used the prospect of the lawsuit “to extort Jess to sleep with him and perform his household chores.” She asked for the subpoena and the case against the Bebes to be dismissed.

In opposing the subpoena, Jess’s filing alleges Marcus “threatened to ‘fuck up every relationship’ of hers and use money that an unnamed organization gave him—perhaps as compensation for bringing this lawsuit—to pay ‘a never-ending fucking supply of private investigators’ to follow Jess and anyone she dated.” Her filing includes transcripts of audio recordings in which Marcus appeared to threaten her with revenge porn and referred to “a collective…of pro-life hackers” he was purportedly in touch with.

In one conversation, Silva acknowledged that Jess said she was “broken” from everything he’d done. According to the transcript in legal filings, Marcus told her, “You’re not considering what can happen to you if I continue to do this shit for the next 40 years.” When she said she was not going to be blackmailed into having sex, according to the transcript, he said, “Then you’re just gonna have your fucking life destroyed in every fucking way that you can imagine to where you want to blow your fucking brains out.” (When Silva’s attorney pursued a subpoena in later court filings, he referred to “Ms. Silva’s ad hominem attacks” on Marcus and said they do not change the fact that the defendants violated the law.)

The Texas Supreme Court ruled that Jess didn’t have to produce what Marcus requested, with a concurring opinion noting “several disturbing indications” that Marcus “engaged in disgracefully vicious harassment and intimidation of his ex-wife during the course of their marriage’s demise and during this litigation.”

“Even when claims like these ultimately fail, the process itself becomes a form of punishment and abuse,” Katherine Fleming writes in the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, on previous attempts to lodge abortion-based wrongful death suits. Fleming discusses a case in a southwestern state where a woman’s ex-husband filed a wrongful death suit against the abortion clinic where she’d had an abortion years earlier. In a deposition, that woman alleged her ex-husband had been “emotionally abusive,” threatened to blackmail her if she left him, and at times wouldn’t let her leave the house or get a job unless she was with him, allegations he had reportedly denied through his attorney. That case is ongoing.

Carpenter knew a lot about Jess’s relationship with Marcus from their years of friendship. “But when you’re confiding in someone, you’re also going to sugarcoat a little bit, so it was incredibly difficult to read” the details in Jess’s filings. Carpenter was proud of Jess for telling her story.

Noyola and Carpenter added additional text messages with Jess to their countersuit, texts their lawyers said were included with Jess’s consent. A few weeks after the alleged abortion, according to Jess’s text, Marcus confronted her. “So now he’s saying if I don’t give him my ‘mind body and soul’ until the end of the divorce, which he’s going to drag out, he’s going to make sure I go to jail for doing it,” Jess texted. She felt trapped.

Someone like Jess is actually protected from civil cases or criminal charges for having an abortion. The anti-abortion movement has sometimes framed those ending a pregnancy as a sort of “second victim,” a characterization that allows the movement to sidestep the politically unsavory move of pursuing criminal charges against those who have abortions in a country where legal abortion has “broad public support.”

On a national scale, abortion rates have not dropped significantly post-Dobbs. That’s not to say that statewide bans are ineffective or fail to have consequences—sometimes catastrophic—for women who are pregnant, miscarrying, or seeking abortions. But telemedicine and abortion pills have changed the landscape of abortion access. Medication abortions, especially when done outside of the health care system, bypass the clinics and in-state doctors that have long been central targets of the anti-abortion movement, decrease the impact of bans, and can muddle the binary between patient and provider.

Perhaps as a response, a growing contingent of the anti-abortion movement is seeking to criminalize having—not only providing—an abortion. Lawmakers have proposed a number of recent bills to punish those who have abortions, including one in Texas last year that would make someone who has an abortion eligible for the death penalty. Thus far, all of these bills have failed to pass.

After filing the Silva suit, Mitchell threatened claims on behalf of other disgruntled Texas men. In one case, for example, a man learned the woman he’d been dating for two months was planning to have an abortion out of state. According to The Washington Post, he immediately sought Mitchell’s representation and issued a legal threat. If she went ahead with the abortion, even in a state where it’s legal, the man said he would seek an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the abortion and “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child.”

After the woman purportedly had an abortion in another state, he sought a court order to question her and two of her family members under oath. But when it went before a judge, the case “fell apart,” according to Marc Hearron, who represented the woman, and the judge denied the petitions. In that case, according to Hearron, “one of the most telling questions that the judge asked was like, ‘Okay, so you need to investigate a wrongful death case, but what’s the wrongful act? What’s wrongful about going to another state and getting an abortion where it is legal?”

In the fall of 2024, 19 months after the first filing, just as the case was about to go to trial, Marcus and Carpenter/Noyola both agreed to drop their lawsuits. No money was exchanged between the parties. Marcus also dropped his case against Garcia. Mitchell told The New York Times that dropping the suit was in his client’s best interest; a lawyer representing Noyola and Carpenter said it was “very telling” Mitchell and Marcus didn’t want to continue.

Legal experts expressed conflicting opinions about the viability of a suit like Marcus’s, but law professor Charles “Rocky” Rhodes believes that a similar claim could succeed in Texas. Ziegler, the legal scholar on abortion politics, said that even though the Silva suit didn’t go to trial or result in a legal victory, beyond any chilling effect it might have, members of the anti-abortion movement “looked at the Silva suit and didn’t see a defeat—they saw a model they could use.”

Medication abortions now make up 63 percent of U.S. abortions, and pills are much harder to track and control than an in-clinic procedure. So it’s not surprising that Mitchell, who filed two more wrongful death suits linked to alleged abortions last summer, isn’t the only one pursuing this strategy, especially since wrongful death suits have the potential to stress-test shield laws and further entrench fetal personhood. (Those suits are ongoing.)

Shield laws were introduced in a number of states after Dobbs in order to protect people who travel there to have abortions, as well as the health care providers who prescribe and send medication abortion to patients in states with abortion bans. Shield laws prevent officials from serving subpoenas or responding to extradition requests initiated by states with bans against such providers. Legal experts have likened the battle over shield laws to the constitutional crisis that emerged over fugitive slave laws.

In one case, Mitchell has targeted an out-of-state doctor with a federally filed wrongful death suit based around a Texas case. National Right to Life has proposed model laws that would expand wrongful death around abortions. Last year, John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, said wrongful death suits are a critical way to target the “digital abortion clinic” and expose individuals, organizations, and companies facilitating or assisting abortions. Seago confirmed the organization has been reaching out to so-called abortion recovery groups for men, anti-abortion pregnancy centers, and their anti-abortion network seeking men for a wrongful death suit of their own. Texas Right to Life leadership confirmed as recently as this May that they are continuing to pursue this strategy, but they still haven’t filed a suit.

Meanwhile, a new Texas law, HB7, offers another route for testing shield laws and trying to restrict medication abortion access in the state. Applying the “bounty hunter” model made popular by SB8, HB7 enables private enforcement around abortion pills and went into effect this past December. Per the new law, anyone who makes, distributes, or helps a pregnant person access abortion pills can be sued for up to $100,000. HB7 lawsuits seem easier to win because they require less proof than wrongful death suits do, explained MaryRose Mazzola, an attorney and reproductive rights professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. Per HB7, the defendant can be operating outside of Texas, which offers another way to target out-of-state providers of abortion pills.

Wrongful death, SB8, and HB7 each carry separate financial penalties. “If you are trying to dissuade people from helping a friend or family member get an abortion, the stacking of these penalties is effective,” said Mazzola. And the dense thicket of lawsuits and new laws has a further effect of sowing confusion and seeding doubt about what actually is legal. As Mazzola put it, “the chaos is part of the strategy.” So far, early tests of shield laws have shown them to be effective in protecting out-of-state doctors. But if telemedicine were no longer able to reach patients in states like Texas, Mazzola noted that the burden “carried by health care providers will fall to informal networks.”

With the Silva lawsuit finally dropped, the defendants appeared defiant. “I have been an abortion advocate and a resource to my community for over 10 years and I don’t intend to ever abandon my cause or my home state of Texas no matter how much the state and others try to intimidate us,” Garcia said via a statement. Noyola and Carpenter were scared when the suit was filed, but by the time the trial date rolled around, they were mostly angry—and looking forward to facing Marcus in court. When we spoke, the two seemed confident in their decisions and their defense, even as they declined to talk to me about the specifics of Marcus’s allegations out of an abundance of caution.

They joked often, which they’d done throughout the months-long legal saga. Of Marcus’s quest for damages, Noyola told me he could take her old car, but “it ain’t gonna go very far.” When I asked what they’d learned from their experience, Carpenter said, “I learned to use encrypted messages” with a laugh. “And not take screenshots!” Noyola added.

The duo expressed concern that someone else might learn from Marcus’s mistakes to mount a stronger case. “We said from the very beginning that they picked the wrong poster child for their movement to try to pull this off,” Noyola said. “If he was a different guy, they probably could have gone further.”

Even without a trial, Carpenter said she couldn’t think of an area of her life the lawsuit hadn’t impacted. “People don’t really understand the amount of mental and emotional capacity that it takes up, especially when it’s something that’s so personal and involves people that you’re really close with.” Noyola described an “eye-opening” amount of support, but also the personal toll. “I just don’t trust people,” she said. “There’s a part of me that died.” Carpenter also reports being more wary of others.

“The shattering of social bonds is not just a side effect of anti-abortion law,” Judith Levine wrote in 2023. “Suspicion, paranoia, and isolation are among the [intentions].” Yet in some ways, the Silva suit had the opposite effect. Despite the initial panic and stress, Garcia told me they drew strength from their community and coworkers who provided support became close friends.

Noyola and Carpenter framed friendship as both a liability and a defense. “In essence, they are being sued because they were good friends,” the countersuit claimed. Right after the settlement, Carpenter told The Texas Tribune that “no decent human is going to try to criminalize people for helping their friend.”

The case strengthened Noyola and Carpenter’s friendship with each other. But they had to stop speaking to Jess because of it, and after the settlement, the trio didn’t pick their friendship back up. Jess works somewhere else now. They’ve heard she’s doing well. “If the cost of her being in a better place is for us to have gone through all of this, I would do it again in a heartbeat,” Carpenter said. But the once-active Bebes chat is now silent.