Texas: Man sues three women for helping his ex-wife get an abortion

Texas: Man sues three women for helping his ex-wife get an abortion.

Biden rushes to calm depositors after two banks collapse in two days.

NATIONAL NEWS

Marcus Silva of Galveston, TX, is suing three friends of his ex-wife, Brittni Silva, seeking $1 million in damages from each friend for helping Brittni to obtain abortion pills. Silva is suing them for wrongful death and conspiracy. He also intends to sue the manufacturer of the abortion pill his ex wife used when he learns what brand it was.

Attached to the lawsuit is a series of text messages between Brittni and two of the women. Brittni had filed for divorce in May 2022, the month before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Then in July 2022, Brittni discovered that she was pregnant. The text messages reveal efforts by two of Brittni’s friends to help her obtain abortion medication.

First, they sent her information about Aid Access, an organization based in Austria which sends abortion medications in the mail. After deciding that the legalities around receiving abortion medication in the mail were “murky”. Eventually, they found out they could obtain the medication in Houston, and a third woman delivered the medication to them.

Brittni then self-managed the abortion at home, concealing both the pregnancy and the termination from her estranged husband.

“Either way, he will use it against me”.

The texts also reveal why Brittni, who already had two daughters with Marcus, chose to terminate the pregnancy secretly. She feared Marcus would use the pregnancy to trap her in a marriage she was apparently desperate to leave.

Brittni confided to her friends that she was in a toxic relationship. She says “I know either way he will use it against me. If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as a way to try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”

In one of the texts, a friend warns Brittni, “Delete all conversations from today. You don’t want him looking through it”. The lawsuit cites this as proof the defendants sought to “destroy evidence of their crimes“.

The Silvas’ divorce was finalized in February. According to the suit, Marcus “recently learned of the defendants’ involvement in the murder of his child, and he brings suit against them for wrongful death and conspiracy”.

Marcus also alleges that 3 months after the abortion, the defendants “celebrated the murder” by dressing up as characters from the TV show “The Handmaid’s Tale” for Halloween. The show is based on the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood and depicts a world where women are the property of men and birth control is outlawed.

“State-sanctioned harassment”

Opponents of the Heartbeat Act and Texas’ other restrictive abortion laws have warned that the laws could enable rapists and abusers to further isolate their victims by harassing those who would help them.

Silva’s lawsuit included pictures of his ex-wife’s cellphone. The snooper’s thumb is visible at left.

Silva’s filing included pictures taken by someone of Brittni’s cellphone showing texts between her and her friends. The filing doesn’t say who took these photos or when.

Former Texas lawmaker Wendy Davis issued a statement from Planned Parenthood Texas, saying the lawsuit “We are outraged, but we are not surprised“. The lawsuit a “direct result of the dangerous policies championed by Governor Greg Abbott and his supporters. It is state-sanctioned harassment and we will not stand for it,” Davis said.

Jonathan Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general, is representing Marcus Silva in the suit. Mitchell was also the architect of Texas’ Heartbeat Act, which allows anyone to sue a person who helps a woman obtain an abortion after 6 weeks’ pregnancy. The suit was filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.

Joanna Grossman of the SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas called the lawsuit “absurd and inflammatory”. No matter the outcome of the suit, Grossman says, the plaintiff and his attorneys will have succeeded in further isolating vulnerable women and girls who need help.

“Who is going to want to help a friend find an abortion if there is some chance that their text messages are going to end up in the news?” Grossman said. “And maybe they’re going to get sued, and maybe they’re going to get arrested, and it’s going to get dropped eventually. But in the meantime, they will have been terrified”.

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Biden rushes to calm depositors after two banks collapse

Over the course of two days, Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York collapsed. Silicon Valley Bank, which largely served tech start-ups and venture capital-backed firms, suffered a massive bank run starting on Wednesday when they announced a bid to raise $1.75 billion to strengthen their liquidity. This became necessary because the bank had been forced to sell off billions of dollars in investments at a loss due to recent Federal Reserve rate hikes.

While the bank’s investment portfolio was being stretched thin, its customer base was in the “bust” end of a boom-bust cycle. Tech start-ups that had received huge investment during the pandemic are now stagnating and are depending more and more on savings to meet payroll and other demands. When the bank announced its asset sell-off and recapitalization plans this week, it spooked investors and then depositors. On Thursday alone, depositors withdrew over $40 billion from SVB. Then California shut it down.

Signature Bank collapsed the day after when their depositors got spooked by the SVB failure. Signature bank has ties to the volatile crypto currency sector which is also facing a post-pandemic decline.

Depositors spent an anxious weekend wondering whether they’d be able to access their funds. Many had deposits in the bank that were greater than the $250,000 limit covered by FDIC. Today, President Biden assured depositors of both SVB and Signature that they would be made whole using funds from an insurance plan both banks were paying into. This, Biden stressed, was “not a bailout”. In the strictest sense, it is a bailout of depositors, but not of the banks’ management or investors, as happened in 2008.

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Why do these bank failures keep happening and how could it be prevented?