Marcus Silva’s lawsuit is a metaphor for the creepy, stupid and cruel nature of the anti-choice movement
man, even knew about his ex-wife’s abortion. Last month, just weeks after the divorce his wife had filed for was finalized, Silva filed a “wrongful death” lawsuit against three of her closest friends, seeking $1m from each. He claims that the women helped his wife obtain abortion medication in July 2022 – two months after she had filed for divorce from him, and just a few weeks after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade and states like Texas outlawed abortion.
His lawyers claim that Silva was wronged, too, by his wife’s choice to terminate the pregnancy “without his knowledge or consent”, a claim that suggests that a man who impregnated a woman gains the ability to compel her to give birth against her will – a kind of property right over her body, conferred by virtue of insemination.
A similar logic of the supposed entitlement and authority of husbands and fathers is at play in a series of anti-choice laws that allow third parties to sue abortion providers – butto a woman’s family, or to the man who impregnated her; as if these people have some claim to control the woman’s choices or enforce on her a pregnancy that she does not want.
The theory reduces women to glorified property, placing their bodies and lives under the control of men, and sees the state less as a protector of women’s personal freedom than as an enforcer of men’s rights to control women. For the anti-choice movement, that’s precisely the point.