The European Commission has warned that Donald Trump’s latest restrictions on foreign aid are dangerous and threaten global health — while saying the EU can’t fill the funding gap alone. The Trump administration revealed further conditions on foreign aid last week, which seek to restrict NGOs, governments and agencies in receipt of U.S. funding from promoting not only abortion but also “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.” The measures come as lower-income countries face catastrophic health impacts after many donors, led by the U.S., dramatically cut funding last year, leaving them with little choice but to accept conditional funds. The policies have appalled health experts who say they are an unprecedented attack on sovereignty and confirm the weaponization of aid under Trump, whose administration is seeking more direct influence over global health programs. Europe has also criticized the expanded policy, stepping up its response compared with more restrained positions to the Trump administration’s other diverging health policies. “Limiting international assistance through restrictive funding conditions undermines joint efforts for human rights, global health, peace and stability. It makes funding more unpredictable and increases the vulnerability of those already most at risk,” European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper told POLITICO. “Ultimately, this risks our goal of saving lives,” Hipper said. The EU would assess the implications for the programs it funds and will remain a “credible, reliable, principled and predictable partner,” but Europe “cannot fill the gap left by others,” Hipper added. The new policy is the widest expansion of the Mexico City Policy — which international groups have called the ‘global gag rule’ because of the restrictions it imposes — that the U.S. has ever imposed. U.S. Vice President JD Vance said last week the Trump administration was “expanding this policy to protect life, to combat [diversity, equity and inclusion] and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children.” He said it would increase the reach of the Mexico City Policy, which has traditionally only applied to abortion advocacy, threefold. It’s the latest policy that underlines the Trump administration’s explicitly strings-attached foreign aid agenda. The U.S. has rolled out a series of bilateral deals with 14 African countries, requiring them to guarantee the U.S. access to pathogen samples and data in exchange for health funding — much of which the U.S. had withdrawn last year through USAID cuts. It has also offered to restore funding to global vaccine program GAVI, but only if the organization stops using a common mercury-based preservative that Trump’s top health officials have linked to autism, without evidence. The latest policy is part of a “much larger project by the Trump administration to advance this radical anti-rights agenda,” Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality, told reporters this week. Desirée Cormier Smith, a former U.S. diplomat, said she hoped governments in the EU and elsewhere would “push back” and deliver a bracing message to the Trump administration: “We refuse to leave all of our people behind. You’re not going to export your domestic culture wars and the division that plagues the U.S. to our own countries.” The new rules, which come into effect Feb. 26, will also increase pressure on European governments over their own levels of global health funding. Major donors such as France, Germany and the Netherlands have trimmed their own contributions, as part of the global crunch in aid spending. Lisa Goerlitz, head of the Brussels office at global health NGO DSW, said Europe must keep foreign aid spending at levels needed “to allow a credible transition towards domestic resources and new financing mechanisms”. The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, meanwhile, said the EU faced a “clear test of its leadership and credibility on equality and human rights.” Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Biden administration enforced a rule in 2022 mandating that retail pharmacies receiving any federal funding had to carry and dispense mifepristone, misoprostol, and methotrexate—drugs used in medication abortions and, in the case of methotrexate, the treatment of ectopic pregnancies and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus—in order not to discriminate on the basis of sex and disability. The Trump administration formally withdrew that rule on Tuesday, allowing pharmacists to refuse to stock or dispense misoprostol and methotrexate, despite their other uses. Even under the Biden-era rule, pharmacists could still refuse to dispense the drug if they suspected or knew a pregnant person was past the date allowed in their state for a medication-induced abortion. Mifepristone was removed from the Biden rule in 2023, after a lawsuit involving anti-abortion litigators at the arch-conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in a case that was subsequently dismissed. I asked the two leading pharmacies in the United States—CVS and Walgreens—if they will continue to stock and dispense methotrexate. A spokesperson from CVS told me that “all our pharmacies continue to stock and dispense methotrexate where legally permissible.” Walgreens did not respond by the time of publication. ADF, meanwhile, celebrated the win it couldn’t get in court, writing that “we are grateful to the Trump administration for rescinding Biden-era guidance that forced Americans to dispense abortion-inducing drugs against their conscience.” Days prior to the Biden administration issuing the rule, NBC’s Today Show covered the challenges faced by patients with chronic illnesses in trying to get their lifesaving medication. With the rule rescinded—and coupled with efforts to criminalize abortion drugs in states like South Carolina, raising concerns that even sympathetic doctors will be scared to prescribe mifepristone, misoprostol, and methotrexate—their availability at smaller pharmacies is likely to drop. That’s despite the fact that people who are able to conceive are supposed to take contraceptives while on methotrexate, which can cause fetal abnormalities, according to the American College of Rheumatology, meaning that their risk of getting pregnant—let alone pursuing an abortion—is in fact quite low. Autoimmune disorders primarily affect women, who have also been the main target of abortion restrictions, underlying how treatment for both shows how women’s health is under attack. Research from KFF found that of reproductive-age women who have used methotrexate in the previous year, over 90 percent did so for reasons unrelated to pregnancy. According to the John Hopkins Arthritis Center, around 60 percent of rheumatoid arthritis patients currently are on or have been on methotrexate. It’s unclear how challenging filling methotrexate prescriptions for chronic illnesses remained under the Biden rule, but it will almost certainly become more difficult without it. Without reliable access to treatment, autoimmune disorders can be very dangerous for those who have them. A 2018 brief report funded in part by the Lupus Foundation of America found that systemic lupus erythematous, one form of lupus, is tied for the top ten leading cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 24. Among Black and Latina women, it’s the fifth leading cause of death for that age group.

Vice President JD Vance on Friday said the United States will stop funding any organization working on diversity and transgender issues abroad. Vance called the policy, which has been widely expected, “a historic expansion of the Mexico City Policy,” which prevents foreign groups receiving U.S. global health funding from providing or promoting abortion, even if those programs are paid for with other sources of financing. President Donald Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy last year, following a tradition for Republican presidents that Ronald Reagan started in 1984. Democratic presidents have repeatedly rescinded the policy. “Now we’re expanding this policy to protect life, to combat [diversity, equity and inclusion] and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children,” Vance told people attending the March for Life in Washington, an annual gathering of anti-abortion activists on the National Mall. The rule covers non-military U.S. foreign assistance, making the Mexico City Policy “about three times as big as it was before, and we’re proud of it because we believe in fighting for life,” Vance said. That means that any organizations receiving U.S. non-military funding will not be able to work on abortion, DEI and issues related to transgender people, even if that work is done with other funding sources. POLITICO reported in October that the Trump administration was developing the policy. The State Department made the rule change Friday afternoon. Vance accused the Biden administration of “exporting abortion and radical gender ideology all around the world.” The Trump administration has used that argument to massively reduce foreign aid since it took office a year ago. Vance said the Trump administration believes that every country in the world has the duty to protect life. “It’s our job to promote families and human flourishing,” he said, adding that the administration “turned off the tap for NGOs whose sole purpose is to dissuade people from having kids.” Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Africa Subcommittee, called the new aid restrictions “the best and most comprehensive iteration” of the Mexico City Policy since Reagan. Smith, who opposes abortion, was also speaking at the March for Life. But domestic and international groups deplored the expanded policy, noting that it would make women and girls in some parts of the world more vulnerable. “History shows that the Mexico City policy not only diminishes access to essential services for women and girls, but also breaks down networks of organizations working on women’s rights, and silences civil society,” the International Crisis Group, which works to prevent conflicts, said in a statement. “This expansion will amplify those effects and is set to compound the global regression on gender equality that we have seen accelerate in the last year,” the group added. The expanded Mexico City Policy, which international groups have called the ‘global gag rule’ because of the restrictions it imposes, will limit how humanitarian groups and other organizations “can engage in advocacy, information dissemination and education related to reducing maternal mortality, sexual and reproductive health, and reducing stigma and inequalities anywhere in the world, with any funding they receive,” said Defend Public Health, a network of volunteers fighting against the Trump administration’s health policies. “This would effectively coerce them into denying that transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people exist,” the group said. Alice Miranda Ollstein contributed to this report.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) decried Republican efforts to discredit medication abortion in an interview Wednesday with Mother Jones, saying that “the only reason they’re going after mifepristone is because it is the way most women get their abortive care.” Mifepristone is one of the pills used in medication abortion, which in 2023 accounted for 63 percent of all terminations in the United States.  On Wednesday morning, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on “protecting women” from the “dangers of chemical abortion drugs.” Chaired by Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the hearing centered on conservative demands for further regulation of abortion medication; two of its three witnesses were medication abortion opponents, including Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who on Tuesday pushed to extradite a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state. Democrats taking part, including Sen. Murray, argued that the hearing wasn’t geared toward protecting women but discrediting settled science. In November, Murray led the Senate Democratic Caucus in sending a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Martin Makary expressing concern over the Trump administration’s review of mifepristone. “Republicans are holding this hearing to peddle debunked junk ‘studies’ by anti-abortion organizations which have no credibility and have been forcefully condemned by actual medical organizations,” Murray said in her opening statement. The hearing, she continued, was “really about the fact that Trump and his anti-abortion allies want to ban abortion nationwide.” According to a New York Times review of more than 100 studies spanning 30 years, abortion medication is safe and effective; mifepristone, used both in medication abortion and to treat miscarriage, has had FDA approval for more than 25 years. In October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill. “You can see that they’re just pulling straws from absolutely everywhere, because they want to obscure the whole goal” to “ban abortion nationwide,” Murray said to me. Republican officials insisted that medication abortion is too easy to get. Yet in 13 states, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances. Another seven states have enacted time restrictions earlier than what was outlined in Roe v. Wade. At the same time, maternity care deserts are expanding across the nation. According to a 2024 report by infant and maternal health nonprofit March of Dimes, more than a thousand US counties—together home to more than 2.3 million women of reproductive age—lack a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician. Since 2020, 117 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies, or announced that they would stop before the end of 2025, according to a December report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. A National Partnership for Women & Families analysis from June warned that 131 rural hospitals with labor and delivery units are at risk of closing altogether due to Republican-led cuts to Medicaid through President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” I asked Sen. Murray about requiring consultations for medication abortion—and why pregnant people aren’t going in person to seek out that route.  “It’s pretty stunning to watch these Republicans talk about this with a straight face,” she told me. “The reason many women don’t,” Murray continued, “is the abortion bans that in Republican states don’t give women the option to see a provider.” Murray expressed concern, “especially after we have a hearing like this, where we heard so much misinformation,” that an already confusing landscape for those seeking abortion could be further obscured. And a new study, published Monday in the leading medical journal JAMA, found that the FDA has repeatedly reviewed new evidence about mifepristone and reaffirmed its safety. Abortion medication, Murray pointed out, is less deadly than both penicillin and Viagra. “We didn’t have a hearing today on Viagra,” she told me. “We had a hearing on mifepristone, so their whole thing about safety and all this is just hogwash.”

At the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’s abortion pills hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri spent the whole of his allotted time reiterating disinformation about transgender people. And, this isn’t the first time he’s utilized a hearing about reproductive healthcare to do so.  During an interaction at the hearing, Sen. Hawley asked Dr. Nisha Verma, who provides reproductive care in Georgia and Massachusetts, “Can men get pregnant?” Hawley asked this question over 10 times, repeatedly cutting her off when she attempted to answer.  Verma, along with Dr. Monique Wubbenhorst and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, was called on by the committee for the hearing. Wubbenhorst previously testified in support of anti-abortion initiatives, and AG Murrill just indicted a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state.  Before Hawley had the chance to share his views on gender, Florida Sen. Ashley Moody kicked off the topic by asking, “Miss Verma, can men get pregnant?” “Dr. Verma,” she corrected. Moody repeated:“Dr. Verma, can men get pregnant?” Verma paused. Moody asked the other witnesses, who quickly replied “no.” Later in the hearing, before handing off the mic to Sen. Hawley, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the committee, said, “I think it’s science-based, by the way, that men can’t have babies.” Then, it was Hawley’s turn.  “Since you bring it up, why don’t we start there,” he began. “Dr. Verma, I wasn’t sure I understood your answer to Sen. Moody a moment ago. Do you think that men can get pregnant?”  “I hesitated there because I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going or what the goal was,” Dr. Verma responded, adding, “I mean I do take care of patients with different identities, I take care of many women, I take care of people with different identities.” “Well,” Hawley returned, “the goal is the truth, so can men get pregnant?” “Again,” Dr. Verma said, “the reason I pause there is I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is—” Hawley cut her off, in part saying, “the goal is just to establish a biological reality.”  “I take care of people with many identities—” Dr. Verma began, before being cut off by Hawley.  “Can men get pregnant?” “I take care of many women, I do take care of people that don’t identify as women—” “Can men get pregnant?” “Again, as I’m saying—” Hawley cut in. This tempo continued, with the senator at one point saying that he was “trying to test, frankly,” Dr. Verma’s “veracity as a medical professional and as a scientist” and “I thought we were passed all of this, frankly.” > Sen. Josh @HawleyMO: "Can men get pregnant?" > > Dr. Nisha Verma: "I'm not really sure what the goal of the question is." > > Hawley: "The goal is just to establish a biological reality…Can men get > pregnant?" pic.twitter.com/4egtfZrPgB > > — CSPAN (@cspan) January 14, 2026 Transgender men can and do get pregnant, as detailed in several different reports currently posted on The National Library of Medicine, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services. Scientific research on this community is still limited, in part due to transgender men being hesitant to seek medical care in hospitals. Research out of Rutgers University found that about 44 percent of pregnant transgender men seek medical care outside of traditional care with an obstetrician, like with a nurse-midwife.  During the hearing, Republican members described abortion medication as dangerous and in need of further restriction. Their Democrat colleagues said that the hearing, entitled “Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs,” was a way to discredit settled science.  Mifepristone, one of the pills used in abortions with medication, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for over 25 years and, just this past October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill. A New York Times review of more than 100 studies on abortion medication found that it is safe and effective. The current pushback against abortion medication, which accounted for 63 percent of all abortions in the US in 2023, is being spearheaded in part by Erin Hawley—the senator from Missouri’s wife. Erin Hawley works for the Alliance Defending Freedom and, in 2024, unsuccessfully argued for further restrictions on abortion medication in front of the Supreme Court. In December, the couple launched “The Love Life Initiative,” which aims to support anti-abortion ballot initiatives.  Back in 2022, at a different hearing on abortion access, Sen. Hawley focused on the same topic with another witness: law professor Khiara Bridges. Hawley began, as he did on Wednesday, by saying he “wants to understand.” “You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women?” Hawley said. Bridges responded, explaining that some cis women can get pregnant while others can’t—and that people who don’t identify as women get pregnant, too. “So,” the senator returned, “this isn’t really a women’s rights issue.”  Bridges replied, smiling: “we can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.” 

Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming following a Tuesday decision in the state’s Supreme Court that said its two abortion bans, including a block on abortion pills, were unconstitutional. The court ruled that the bans violate a 2012 amendment to the Wyoming Constitution that protects an adult’s right to make their own healthcare decisions. One law banned abortion with few exceptions, such as in cases of rape or incest, and the other explicitly prohibited abortion pills. Wyoming was the only state in the country to implement an outright ban.  As Bolts, an organization that reports on local elections and policies, noted in 2023, this amendment was part of a conservative push against Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Conservatives argued that the legislation was government interference. Progressives, meanwhile, including reproductive rights advocates in Wyoming, have used the amendment to protect abortion access.  “A woman has a fundamental right to make her own health care decisions, including the decision to have an abortion,” the ruling from Tuesday reads. Wyoming’s only abortion clinic, Wellspring Health Access, was one of the plaintiffs in the case. In a statement, Julie Burkhart, president of the clinic, told Mother Jones that the decision “affirmed what we’ve always known to be true: abortion is essential health care, and the government should not interfere in personal decisions about our health.” “While we celebrate today’s ruling, we know that anti-abortion politicians will continue their push to restrict access to health care in Wyoming with new, harmful proposals in the state legislature,” Burkhart added.  The decision also implies that anti-abortion lawmakers in Wyoming would need to amend the state constitution to ban abortion, rather than a majority vote in the Republican-dominated legislature.  Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon immediately called for just that on Tuesday, saying in a statement: “It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote, and I believe it should go before them this fall.” A move to amend the constitution would be decided by voters in the 2026 election.

In another assault on reproductive rights by the Trump administration, the US Department of Veterans Affairs sent out a memo on Monday announcing that it will no longer provide abortion or abortion counseling. This change stems from a Department of Justice legal opinion on December 18 that reinstated exclusions on abortions and abortion counseling that the Biden administration had removed in 2022. That Biden-era ruling expanded abortion access for veterans in cases of rape, incest, or threats to life and health, even in states with bans.  The DOJ cited a rule the VA proposed in August that argued Biden demonstrated federal overreach by expanding abortion access just months after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But, according to the VA, Biden’s decision forced taxpayer funding for abortion. “Pregnant Veterans and VA beneficiaries deserve to have access to world-class reproductive care when they need it most,” Denis McDonough, Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, said in 2022, calling it “a patient safety decision.” The new directive, obtained by Mother Jones, states that it won’t prohibit care to “pregnant women in life-threatening circumstances, including treatment for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages.” However, these exceptions often do not work. According to Jessica Valenti, a writer on feminism and politics, exceptions “are deliberately crafted to be impossible to use” and only exist “to make Republicans seem a little less punishing.”  Half of the states in the country protect the right to abortion. The VA’s ban will also apply in those states. The Department of Veterans Affairs did not respond to Mother Jones‘ questions about the removal of exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or health emergencies and the usurping of state laws. The scale of this issue is significant. According to the VA’s own numbers, there are more than 700,000 family members who are eligible for its care. There are over 2.1 million women veterans and thousands of transgender men and non-binary veterans who may need abortion care.  The VA’s memo also states that employees may request to opt out of providing “any aspect of clinical care based on their sincerely held moral and religious beliefs, observances, practices, or exercises,” which could leave the door open for more discriminatory lawmaking in health care access. For theTrump administration, that is the point. Project 2025 recommended that the Veterans Health Administration “rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery.” Roughly half of the president’s judicial nominees have anti-abortion records.

STRASBOURG — The European Parliament has voted today to set up an EU fund to expand access to abortion for women across the bloc, in a historic vote that divided lawmakers. The plan would establish a voluntary, opt-in financial mechanism to help countries provide abortion care to women who can’t access it in their own country and who choose to travel to one with more liberal laws. European citizens presented the plan in a petition — through the campaign group “My Voice, My Choice.” Lawmakers in Strasbourg voted 358 in favor and 202 against the proposal, and 79 MEPs abstained. The topic sparked animated discussions in the European Parliament plenary on Tuesday evening. MEPs with center-right and far-right groups tabled competing texts to the resolution put forward by Renew’s Abir Al-Sahlani on behalf of the women’s rights and gender equality committee. Supporters of the scheme argued it would help reduce unsafe abortions and ensure women across the bloc have equal rights; those who oppose it, mostly from conservative groups, dismissed it as an ideological push and EU overreach into national policy. Abortion laws vary greatly across the EU, from near-total bans in Poland and Malta to liberal rules in the Netherlands and the U.K. The fund could be a game changer for the thousands of European women who travel every year to another EU country to access abortion care. The European Commission now has until March 2026 to give a response. This story is being updated.

Even if you have no idea what a crisis pregnancy center is, the donor website for the First Choice Women’s Resource Centers chain in northeastern New Jersey offers plenty of clues: Prominent logos for the anti-abortion groups Heartbeat International and CareNet. A home page banner proclaiming “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday 2026.” An agreement for prospective volunteers that states, “I openly acknowledge my personal faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” and “[I] reject abortion as an acceptable option for any woman.” That’s what appears on the website directed at First Choice’s donors. The chain also has two websites targeted at potential clients—pregnant women who might be seeking an abortion but end up on the crisis pregnancy center website instead, where First Choice is less clear about its religious ties and anti-abortion mission. “Learn more about the abortion pill, abortion procedures, and your options in New Jersey,” one site urges on its home page. “We specialize in pre-termination evaluations,” another site says, with services that include “free and confidential Abortion Information Consultation” and “post-abortion support.” On most pages, it is only at the very bottom that the qualifier, First Choice “do[es] not perform or refer for” abortions, appears. Websites that tell anti-abortion supporters one thing and pregnant women something else are common among the country’s 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs—part of a well-documented history of using misinformation and deception, as well as free ultrasounds and other services, to deter women from having abortions. Some of the best-known strategies include opening “fake” clinics near real abortion clinics, misstating the purported harms of abortion and emergency contraception, and pushing the unproven medical procedure known as “abortion pill reversal.” > Blue states have repeatedly tried to rein in CPCs. But as faith-based > organizations, pregnancy centers have a powerful shield—the First Amendment. Blue-state lawmakers and attorneys general have repeatedly tried to rein in CPCs. But as faith-based organizations, these pregnancy centers have a powerful shield—the First Amendment. When states try to regulate them, CPCs invariably claim that these efforts violate constitutional protections for free speech, religious expression, and freedom of association. In a landmark 2018 decision, the US Supreme Court sided with the CPC industry, blocking a California law that would have required pregnancy centers to inform patients about state-funded family-planning services, including abortion. That decision chilled state and local efforts to curb CPCs’ more controversial practices, creating what one legal scholar has called “a regulatory dead zone.” Meanwhile, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, the number of CPCs has grown—boosted by a surge in state funding and private donations—and reproductive rights supporters have renewed their push for greater oversight, this time focusing on consumer protection. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in its latest CPC case, this one involving New Jersey’s efforts to investigate whether First Choice may have misled consumers. The question before the court is technical: Can CPCs run directly to federal court to fight an attorney general’s subpoena, as First Choice did, or must they first go to state court? As reporters Garnet Henderson and Susan Rinkunas recently wrote in Mother Jones and Autonomy News, the answer could have sweeping consequences for the $2 billion-a-year CPC industry: > Boring as this procedural quibble may seem, a favorable decision would be a > significant win for CPCs. They have a much better shot at winning any case in > the Trumpified federal courts than they do in state courts that may be more > supportive of abortion rights. What’s more, the ability to use friendly > federal courts as a shield from state regulation would set pregnancy centers > up for success in other lawsuits making their way to the Supreme Court—ones > that could eliminate states’ ability to crack down on [abortion pill reversal] > and other questionable practices entirely. But the case has also raised concerns among groups aligned with progressives that the same type of subpoenas issued by New Jersey against First Choice could be weaponized against humanitarian groups, journalists, and protesters. “The problem is bipartisan,” the ACLU wrote in one amicus brief. While New Jersey focuses on crisis pregnancy centers, “Florida’s attorney general pursues restaurants for hosting drag shows,” and Missouri’s attorney general investigates chatbots “to find out why they express disfavored views about President Trump.” In another brief, lawyers for Annunciation House, a Texas nonprofit that has been targeted for providing shelter and support to immigrants, wrote, “Nonprofit organizations—which rely heavily on volunteers—bear the heaviest burdens when faced with…state investigatory demands.” The stakes, the brief said, “can be existential.” The case dates from November 2023, when New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin—an abortion rights supporter and CPC critic—issued a subpoena against First Choice as part of an investigation into whether the pregnancy chain was “misleading donors and potential clients into believing that it was providing certain reproductive health care services,” Platkin’s office states in a brief. The subpoena was broad, seeking 10 years’ worth of emails, videos, handbooks, the identities of many of its donors, and other information about First Choice’s ads and solicitations, its services and staff, and its claims about medical procedures, including abortion pill reversal. State and federal agencies have been using similar subpoenas to investigate potential violations of the laws they enforce for over 150 years, Platkin’s brief points out. Such subpoenas are not “self-executing,” meaning that Platkin’s office didn’t have the power to enforce them. Instead, in New Jersey and the rest of the country, the long-accepted procedure for enforcing or challenging a state agency’s subpoena is to seek relief in state court. If First Choice disagreed with the ruling from a New Jersey court, it could then plead its case in federal court.  But First Choice’s attorneys—the conservative legal behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom—cried foul, saying the CPC had done nothing wrong and accusing Platkin of “selectively target[ing] the nonprofit based on its religious speech and pro-life views.” Pregnancy centers “have been subject to a shocking level of violence and intimidation,” ADF asserted in one court filing. “First Choice is concerned that if its donors’ identities became public, they may be subjected to similar threats.” > “We haven’t forced those services on anyone. We haven’t charged any women for > the services we provide…. Yet Platkin calls this kind of caring ‘extremist.’” The lawyers also pointed to a 2021 Supreme Court precedent blocking California’s efforts to force charities and nonprofits in the state to report the identities of their major donors. According to ADF, the Platkin subpoena was so concerning that First Choice should be able to seek immediate relief in the federal courts, rather than having to expend time and resources litigating the issue first in state court. The ADF team—including Erin Hawley, wife of Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley—compared Platkin’s investigation to Southern states’ attempts to force the NAACP to produce member lists in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  In an op-ed for NJ.com, First Choice’s executive director, Aimee Huber, noted that in 2022 alone, CPCs throughout the US provided 500,000 free ultrasounds, 200,000 STI tests, 3.5 million packs of diapers, and 43,000 car seats to women and families in need. “Over the last 40 years, First Choice has been privileged to offer crucial resources to more than 36,000 women across our state. We haven’t forced those services on anyone. We haven’t charged any women for the services we provide…Yet Platkin calls this kind of caring ‘extremist.’” But courts have repeatedly ruled that the case wasn’t ready—or “ripe”—to be litigated in federal court. A state judge, meanwhile, ordered Platkin and First Choice to negotiate to narrow the subpoena’s scope. The first time First Choice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, back in February 2024, the justices declined. But when ADF tried again, this past spring, the court took the case. Most of the amicus briefs siding with First Choice are from a predictable collection of anti-abortion and conservative or libertarian groups, including red-state attorneys general, Republican members of Congress, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. But the CPC chain also received support from some unexpected quarters, including animal rights activists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, represented by the ACLU.  In its brief, the humanitarian relief group Annunciation House described being hit with an investigative subpoena by Ken Paxton in 2024 demanding that it immediately turn over thousands of documents about immigrants and refugees it has helped—including sensitive medical and personally identifiable information—or face being shut down. The subpoena touched off a grueling, costly fight in state courts, with the Texas Supreme Court ultimately siding with Paxton. “The chilling effect impacts not only the targeted nonprofit, but also the broader nonprofit community, as organizations may avoid lawful speech or actions out of fear that they will lead to investigatory scrutiny,” the Annunciation House lawyers write. “Left unchecked, the [subpoena] process becomes the punishment.” In an interview with Mother Jones, Grayson Clary, a lawyer at the Reporters Committee, raised similar concerns. “Well beyond the context of this crisis pregnancy center, we have seen more state attorneys general trying to use their consumer protection authorities in new and potentially troubling ways, including to investigate news organizations,” he said, pointing to a Missouri case targeting the left-leaning Media Matters. “Saying, ‘We’re not after the journalism—we’re just protecting the consumers’ is often a fig leaf for efforts to control the content that a news organization is putting out.” “In practical terms,” Clary said, “what’s at stake in this question is how much of a tax does a state attorney general get to place on you for speaking, or for publishing news that they might disagree with, before you get a chance to ask a court to put a halt to it? And that question really can, in practical terms, be life or death, especially for a smaller or nonprofit news outlet,” On the abortion-rights side, what is most surprising about the amicus briefs is that they are nonexistent. But one group paying close attention to the case is Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, a CPC watchdog. “If the Court finds in favor of this pregnancy center,” executive director Debra Rosen says, “I worry that it’s going to chill further scrutiny into this massive [CPC] industry.” Instead, amicus briefs in support of keeping the First Choice case out of federal court come from agencies that routinely issue investigative subpoenas, including blue-state attorneys general and state medical boards. The consequences of adopting First Choice’s argument would be “far-reaching,” Platkin’s office argues, “turning every quotidian subpoena dispute into a federal case.” The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case by next summer.

In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.   “If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help.  This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2025.