Texas lawsuit explained: How a man is suing his ex-wife’s friends for murder over her abortion. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/texas-lawsuit-suing-friends-explained.html

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"On the surface, this argument makes some sense. Upon closer scrutiny, it falls apart. There is a hole at its center: Texas law expressly states that an individual does not commit a criminal act when she terminates her own pregnancy. The state’s abortion bans, homicide statute, and assault statute all declare that self-managed abortion is not a criminal act and cannot be punished as one. So even if Doe’s fetus “died,” for purposes of Texas law, its death was not “wrongful,” so no one can be held liable for abetting it. As Joanna Grossman, a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, told Slate: “If there’s no wrongful death, then there’s no wrongful death liability.”

“Jonathan Mitchell knows he’s not going to win this case,” Grossman said. “It’s all smoke and mirrors.” (It is a perverse irony of the litigation that the defendants earnestly tried to give Doe accurate legal advice while Mitchell is deliberately misusing the law to terrorize them for doing just that.) What, then, is the purpose of this lawsuit? It seems the suit has several extralegal goals, all of which are rooted in a brazenly misogynistic desire to let men manipulate the legal system to control women’s bodies and keep them trapped in dangerous relationships.

It seems the suit has several extralegal goals, all of which are rooted in a brazenly misogynistic desire to let men manipulate the legal system to control women’s bodies and keep them trapped in dangerous relationships.
One aim is certainly to set a precedent that helps isolate pregnant people through terror and surveillance. The fear of winding up ensnared in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that ruins the lives of one’s closest friends is certainly a good motivator. Mitchell, Cain, and the Thomas More lawyers want all pregnant Texans to understand that they are being watched —in this case, by a vindictive ex—and will be reported to the state if they seek to terminate a pregnancy. They are never safe from men who will wield litigation as a tool to punish women who attempt to escape a manipulative partner. This is spousal abuse via lawsuit. Indeed, in 1992, the Supreme Court refused to allow for mandatory spousal notification precisely because it could be used as a cudgel to abuse and torment women. SCOTUS reversed that decision when it overruled Roe, though, and this complaint is the inevitable result of that reversal: It attempts to assert that every husband should now be granted the right to terrorize pregnant people and bankrupt their friends.
...
That, of course, was the goal of S.B. 8, which empowered random strangers to sue anyone who dared to “aid or abet” a clinical abortion. Now Mitchell is broadening his dragnet to include medication abortions, placing a bounty on the head of anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain these pills.
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Second, the suit serves as a window. It’s crucial to see where the anti-abortion movement is heading next now that Roe v. Wade has fallen. Their quest to end abortion has been undercut by the ubiquity of abortion pills, which are very easy to procure online and to ship across state and international lines. While some lawyers fight to ban these drugs nationwide, others, like Mitchell, seek to ruin the lives of anyone who facilitates their delivery to a pregnant person or offers advice on how to procure them. In other words, S.B. 8 was only the beginning of the anti-abortion vigilantism. The lawyers hellbent on obliterating all access to reproductive care will not rest until anyone who so much as texts a friend about abortion must fear that they could be defamed as a murderer."