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.

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.

Abortion may not technically be on the ballot in Tuesday’s off-year state elections, but in the post-Roe v. Wade era, abortion is always on the ballot. Since the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling that ended the federal right to abortion, statewide elections have become opportunities for reproductive rights supporters and opponents alike to expand or limit access to care by voting on the politicians who create the laws, the judges who enforce them, and, sometimes, on the laws themselves.  When voters have had the opportunity to weigh in directly on ballot measures enshrining abortion protections, those measures have mostly won, even in red states. When the vote is indirect—that is, for people rather than policies—the results are much more mixed. Just consider what happened in 2024, when states that approved abortion-rights measures also went for anti-abortion judges and Donald Trump. This week’s elections are the first time that large numbers of voters can express their feelings about the country’s radical change in direction under Trump 2.0. In five states, the results will also have major statewide and even national implications for access to reproductive care. CALIFORNIA California’s Proposition 50, the blockbuster redistricting measure designed to stop Republicans from rigging next year’s midterm elections, will affect all kinds of democratic rights, including reproductive autonomy. Prop 50 would temporarily suspend California’s current congressional maps, which were drawn by an independent citizens commission, and allow the Democratic-controlled legislature to create new maps that would remain in place through 2030. Governor Gavin Newsom and his allies got the idea after Texas lawmakers, buckling to Trump’s demands, redrew their congressional map to elect more Republicans—potentially enough to keep the US House of Representatives under GOP control in 2026 and beyond. If approved by voters, Prop 50 could sufficiently alter the partisan makeup of California’s House delegation—currently 43 Democrats and nine Republicans—to effectively negate the Texas redistricting effort. Polls show that California voters are very much on board. Republicans currently have a slim six-seat majority in the House; a wider margin could empower them to unleash all manner of new legislative horrors on the country, including, potentially, an extension of this year’s temporary defunding of Planned Parenthood and even a national ban on abortion after 15 or 20 weeks of pregnancy. A Democratic majority, on the other hand, would bring the GOP legislative machine in Congress grinding to a halt. With so much at stake, total spending by both sides is well north of $175 million. During a press call, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, described the GOP efforts to further gerrymander red states as “a naked attempt to steal congressional seats” and “an emergency for our democracy.” Prop 50, added John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, is “a defensive shield for our democracy and for reproductive rights.” NEW JERSEY New Jersey voters will pick a new governor and all 80 members of the General Assembly. With Democrats currently holding a 52-to-28 majority there—and a 25-15 margin in the state Senate—most of the attention has been on the tight race between Democratic congresswoman Mikie Sherrill and Republican ex-assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, to replace termed-out Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. Recent polls show Sherrill—a former Navy helicopter pilot and onetime federal prosecutor—narrowly ahead. But Ciattarelli, who nearly ousted Murphy in the 2021 race, is hoping he can ride Donald Trump’s 2024 coattails to victory on Tuesday. (Trump didn’t win the state but made huge gains compared to 2020.) New Jersey’s pattern of flip-flopping between Democratic and Republican governors may be another factor in Ciattarelli’s favor: No party has held the office for three consecutive terms since 1961. Months before Roe was overturned, New Jersey lawmakers passed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act, enshrining protections for abortion care into state law; Sherrill would go further, adding these protections to the state constitution. Ciattarelli, by contrast, would ban abortion after 20 weeks (currently there are no gestational limits), end coverage under state Medicaid, and require parental consent for minors. A Democratic legislature, however, would thwart any efforts to put those policies in place. But Ciattarelli would be able to stop new reproductive protections from becoming law—for example, potential legislative efforts to strengthen the state’s shield laws that protect abortion providers who care for out-of-state patients. Reproductive rights advocates point to what happened during the tenure of Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who was in office from 2010 to 2018, during which he repeatedly vetoed funding for family planning. “We’ve been here before, and we know what we could expect under a Ciattarelli governorship,” Kaitlyn Wojtowicz of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey told the New Jersey Monitor. “It would be devastating for public health.”  PENNSYLVANIA For decades after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, Pennsylvania activists and politicians led the fight to narrow its reach—if not overturn it altogether. These days, despite Roe’s reversal, Pennsylvania continues to allow abortion through 23 weeks of pregnancy, albeit with significant restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period, bans on Medicaid coverage, and a parental consent requirement for minors. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court demonstrated last year just how much the state has shifted, ruling that the 42-year-old Medicaid ban is a form of sex-based discrimination under the state’s Equal Rights Amendment. The decision suggested that courts might be open to throwing out other abortion restrictions that lawmakers—with Republicans controlling the Senate and Democrats holding a single-seat majority in the House—seem unlikely to repeal anytime soon. On November 4, the Democratic justices responsible for that ruling—Kevin Dougherty, Christine Donohue, and David Wecht—will come before voters in a retention election with enormous consequences not just for abortion, but for next year’s midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election in a crucial swing state. This is the same court, after all, that struck down Pennsylvania’s congressional map in 2018 as an unconstitutional gerrymander and rejected complaints about election monitoring by Trump’s 2020 campaign. The three justices were first elected in 2015, in a sweep that flipped the court to Democrats. If they win on Tuesday—and in the state’s history, only one justice has ever lost a retention vote—they will serve for up to another 10 years. If they lose, only two Democrats and two Republicans will remain, and the next judicial election will not take place until 2027. Political infighting in the meantime would hamper efforts by Democratic governor Josh Shapiro to appoint temporary replacements—a situation that Justice Donohue told the Associated Press could lead to “chaos.” Spending in the races is expected to exceed $15 million—far surpassing previous retention elections—as Democrats try to blunt Republican efforts to retake the court.  TEXAS Texas parents have long had the right to oversee their children’s education and health care and direct their upbringing. Those protections got a lot stronger this year, with the passage of Senate Bill 12—the “Texas Parents Bill of Rights”—which, among other things, requires schools to obtain parental consent before students can receive health services, including counseling, or participate in school clubs and organizations. But that bill—and a slew of other new laws that make it easier for parents to challenge the policies and curricula in schools that they don’t like—still weren’t enough for Texas’s parental-rights extremists. Lawmakers also approved Proposition 15, a constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot that would enshrine a parent’s rights “to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing. ” It would also enshrine a parent’s responsibility “to nurture and protect [their] child.”  Supporters claim the constitutional amendment is needed to ensure that parents’ rights can’t someday be repealed. Opponents say the amendment would make it even harder for minors to access contraception and sex education, and for LGBTQ kids to navigate an ever-more-hostile political environment. Prop 15’s vagueness and allusions to parental “responsibility” are also concerning. The measure would “open the door for another parent’s personal beliefs to strip rights from other people’s children and their families,” the reproductive justice group Avow Texas warns, and could lead to “delays in young people getting care, censorship in schools, and increased family policing.” Opponents’ other big fear is that Prop 15 will inspire conservative lawmakers in other red states to pass copycat bills. Denise Rodriguez of the Texas Equal Access Fund says the ballot measure is “about perpetuating the culture wars” and conservatives’ desire to crush dissent: “They want to do everything that they can to control the way that people live.” VIRGINIA Virginians will choose a new governor to replace Republican Glenn Youngkin, who is barred from running for a second consecutive term, as well as a new lieutenant governor, attorney general, and members of the 100-seat House of Delegates. According to recent polls, Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and three-term congresswoman, is leading her Republican opponent, current Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, in the race to become the state’s first female governor. That comes as a relief to abortion rights supporters, given Earle-Sears’s past statements equating abortion to “genocide” and supporting a six-week ban. Virginia is the only Southern state that hasn’t restricted abortion in the post-Dobbs era; the procedure remains legal through 21 weeks of pregnancy, which has made it a destination for patients from around the South who can no longer obtain care where they live.  The real battle over the fate of abortion in Virginia is taking place in legislative races. Democrats now control both chambers of the General Assembly—the House of Delegates by a 51-48 margin and the state Senate by 21-19. That narrow majority allowed Democrats to pass a proposed ballot amendment this past winter that could let voters decide whether to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. But under Virginia law, legislators must pass the amendment again during the 2026 session; then voters will get the final say next November. Republicans are targeting a few key races in Tuesday’s election in hopes of flipping control of the House and derailing the constitutional amendment. (The next elections for the state Senate take place in 2027.)   The House of Delegates races also could affect two other proposed constitutional amendments passed by lawmakers this year. One would restore voting rights for people with past felony convictions. The other would remove a ban on same-sex marriage from the state constitution—a now-defunct “zombie” law that could potentially be revived if the Supreme Court were to overturn its 2015 ruling that gave gay couples the right to marry. It’s a lesson Democrats learned after the Dobbs ruling: Counting on the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority to protect existing rights is dangerous. Especially when some of the same conservatives who worked so hard to overturn Roe are now gunning for gay marriage.

Anti-abortion advocates haven’t just played key roles in rolling back abortion rights in recent years. They also helped tank President Donald Trump’s campaign-trail promise to make in vitro fertilization free. That’s according to a new report published Saturday in Politico, which reveals that anti-abortion activists—some of whom are opposed to IVF because it involves discarding unused embryos—spent more than a year lobbying the Trump campaign, and then his administration, to ensure that officials did not subsidize or mandate coverage of the procedure. They got their wish earlier this month, when the president announced a far more limited initiative: a cost-cutting agreement with a leading fertility medication manufacturer to slash prices on a drug involved in the IVF process. Trump also announced the creation of a new fertility insurance benefit that employers could voluntarily offer to employees. “There were letters and meetings and calls—a lot of activity,” Kristi Hamrick, vice president for media and policy at the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told Politico. “We told [the administration] that it would be an absolute violation of people’s conscience rights to force taxpayers to subsidize IVF, which has the business model that destroys more life than is ever born.” Anti-abortion advocates had long been vocal about their opposition to Trump’s promises to promote IVF. After his February executive order—which claimed to expand access to the procedure but merely required an official to gather ideas on how to do so, as I reported at the time—several leading abortion opponents decried the move. But the Politico story indicates that anti-abortion advocates’ involvement in scaling back the administration’s moves on IVF was greater than previously known. “A lot of people met with different people within the administration over the last eight months to say, ‘This is not pro-life. This is not going to raise birth rates. This pumps money into an industry that a lot of pro-lifers have great concerns over, because of the potential for eugenics. So let’s tap the brakes on this,'” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told Politico. Beyond the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Students for Life of America, other anti-abortion groups that were reportedly involved in pressuring the administration include Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Americans United for Life. Those groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday. According to Politico, White House officials also gave the advocates a heads-up before Trump’s announcement of his IVF policies: > In a sign of how seriously they took the groups’ arguments, administration > officials held a briefing call for a select group of activists ahead of last > week’s announcement to address their fears of a coverage mandate. According to > two anti-abortion advocates on the call, granted anonymity to discuss the > private event, the White House did not take questions. > > A White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about > behind-the-scenes conversations, confirmed both the call and the key role > anti-abortion groups played in developing the policy. Their influence ensured > that no employer is obligated to cover IVF, that no federal funding supports > it, and that new coverage options can include alternative fertility treatments > promoted by groups who oppose abortion. > > > > “It’s providing flexibility, not just in an ideological sense, but just in a > medical sense,” the official said. “It would be bad policy just to push > everyone onto IVF.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to Mother Jones. Politico reports that anti-abortion advocates also pushed the White House Domestic Policy Council—which was tasked with coming up with suggestions to deliver to the president—to back “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM), a loose group of approaches that allegedly tackles the root causes of infertility, as my colleague Kiera Butler wrote last year. Leading medical organizations have said that RRM is not evidence-based and that it is not a distinct concept, but instead a repackaging of work that fertility doctors already do to support patients. During Trump’s Oval Office announcement, officials did not explicitly reference RRM, but they—including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—did repeatedly say that they plan to address “the root causes” of infertility. An expert on IVF access who did not want to be named for fear of retribution previously told me they were concerned by these mentions: “On the one hand, we were happy because they didn’t say ‘restorative reproductive medicine.’ And on the other hand, we were concerned because they said ‘root causes’ several times.” But for all the administration’s attempts to pander to every conceivable interest group, it could not manage to make everyone happy. Some on the left said that there was more Trump could do to expand access to IVF and that the announcement amounted to a failure to deliver on his campaign pledge. On the anti-abortion side, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops called Trump’s announcement a “harmful government action” that could “push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.” Lila Rose, head of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said on X that Trump’s announcement is “not a solution to fertility struggles.” And Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, called the announcement a “disappointment.”

In the Oval Office on Thursday, several Cabinet members and advocates for in vitro fertilization (IVF) gathered to claim that President Donald Trump was delivering on his campaign trail pledge to radically expand access to the popular but expensive process for getting pregnant. In reality, Thursday’s announcement falls far short of Trump’s prior promise to make IVF free. Trump announced two steps that the government will take to try to bring down the costs of the treatment, which can reach up to $20,000 per cycle. The first is entering a cost-cutting agreement with EMD Serono, a leading fertility medication manufacturer, to slash prices on Gonal-f, an injectable drug involved in the IVF process. The second is creating a new fertility insurance benefit that employers could voluntarily adopt to offer to employees, just like they do with dental or vision insurance. Officials in the Oval Office cast the news as a historic precursor to the baby boom that Republicans so desperately want. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), who Trump credits with teaching him what IVF actually is, called the president’s actions the “most pro-IVF thing a president has ever done.” Mehmet Oz, the ex-TV doctor and current administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) at the Department of Health and Human Services, chillingly predicted: “I know what you’re all thinking, and you’re probably right: There are going to be a lot of Trump babies. I think that’s probably a good thing.” > Dr Oz: "Now I know what you're all thinking, and you're probably right — > there's going to be a lot of Trump babies. And I think that's a good thing." > pic.twitter.com/A9XYUlbf1h > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2025 These moves could, indeed, have some benefits to Americans seeking to get pregnant using IVF. Oz’s CMS estimates the drug agreement will save users of the fertility medications, which can cost several thousand dollars, up to $2,200 per cycle, the White House says. The drugs will be available directly to consumers on the (subtly-named) trumprx.gov, with additional discounts available to low-income women. Only a quarter of companies with 200 or more employees currently offer IVF coverage, according to KFF, and more than 40 percent of American adults say they or someone they know have used fertility treatments, according to Pew Research. The Labor, Treasury, and HHS departments issued guidance on Thursday for how employers can offer the benefits, and will propose additional pathways in the future, officials said. > It’s unclear how many employers will actually provide the fertility > benefit—especially since the government will not subsidize it. But all in all, the Thursday White House announcement is no substitute for Trump’s campaign trail promise that he would force the government or private insurance companies to fund IVF—a move that would reportedly have cost an estimated $8 billion, or about 40 percent of the price tag on Trump’s recent bailout of Argentina. While campaigning last year, in the midst of concerns about whether mounting abortion restrictions would imperil IVF access, which often involves discarding embryos, Trump told NBC News: “We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” he said, adding, “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.” Thursday’s announcement does not do any of this. > Former President Trump tells NBC News that if he’s re-elected, his > administration would not only protect access to IVF, but would have either the > government or insurance companies cover the cost of it. > > More: https://t.co/AzV45GBhFd pic.twitter.com/rZZdejDGXX > > — NBC News (@NBCNews) August 29, 2024 Back in August, anonymous officials told the Washington Post that they had dropped hopes for those plans because it would require an act of Congress to make IVF an essential benefit that insurance companies must cover—a surprising rationale from a White House that seems to be otherwise unconcerned with securing congressional approval. (A bill last year, the HOPE with Fertility Services Act, introduced by then-Rep. and current Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, would have done just that. The bill has not yet been re-introduced in this session of Congress.) And as the New York Times pointed out earlier Thursday, when it first reported news of the IVF announcement, it is unclear how many employers will actually provide the fertility benefit—especially since the government will not subsidize it. Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a research and advocacy organization, told me that “there’s still a lot of details to grapple with before we can really say how beneficial” the new actions will be. But he added: “I do think it’s important that a Republican White House got all the relevant Cabinet secretaries together to say a lot of positive things about IVF.” Sen. Britt, Tipton said, “was not exaggerating” when she praised Trump’s efforts as historic—”but that also shows what a low bar it is,” he added. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) praised Trump’s efforts to expand access to IVF as historic.Alex Brandon/AP Tipton also reiterated a couple of other ways that, as he previously told me, Trump could have dramatically expanded IVF access: Requiring fertility coverage for federal workers through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and mandating IVF coverage by TRICARE, the military health insurance program used by more than 9 million active service members, retirees, and their families. “As the CEO of a big employer, the president should make sure all his employees have access to care,” Tipton said. Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Thursday. Trump has a lengthy history of unfulfilled promises on IVF. Back in February, Trump signed an executive order that the White House claimed was “expanding access” to fertility treatments—but all that it actually did was deputize a government official to deliver to Trump, within 90 days “a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment,” as I wrote at the time. And even after that 90-day deadline, which fell in May, came and went, the White House failed to release that report publicly. In the middle of that period, in April, mass firings at HHS led to the elimination of a six-person team working on expanding access to assisted reproductive technology, including IVF, at the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as I reported. Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of the advocacy organization Reproductive Freedom for all, called Trump’s announcement an effort “to gaslight the American public into believing he’ll deliver on empty campaign promises.” Danielle Melfi, CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, struck a different tone, calling Trump’s announcement “an important step forward on the road to ensuring all Americans can access the care they need to build the families of their dreams.” But as Tipton put it: “There is a lot of work for the President to do to make good on his campaign promise to make sure that every American who needs help building their families can get that help.”

Women are the fast-growing population of incarcerated people. And if Republicans get their way, more pregnant women will be joining their ranks. That’s because conservatives are behind a growing push to criminalize pregnancy outcomes nationwide, in part by giving full rights to fetuses. And while abortion opponents have long claimed they do not want to criminalize abortion-seekers themselves, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, a growing number of conservative lawmakers have begun introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide and criminalize abortion-seekers. These laws will likely put more Black and Latina women behind bars, who are already imprisoned at higher rates than white women.  President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is also ensnaring pregnant immigrant women: A report issued last month by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) alleged that officials identified more than a dozen credible reports of the mistreatment of pregnant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which included not receiving adequate, or even urgent, medical care and being denied food. The Department of Homeland Security has disputed those allegations, saying in part, “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review.” These recent events make Rebecca Rodriguez Carey’s new book, Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prisons, incredibly timely. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly three dozen women who were incarcerated in prisons throughout the Midwest while pregnant, the book provides rare insight into the experiences of pregnant women behind bars—an issue that lacked federal data until the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) issued its first report on the state of pregnant women in prisons earlier this year. But even the exact number of pregnant women in prisons remains unclear, in part because incarcerated women do not always have access to pregnancy tests: The BJS report, for example, cites more than 320 in state and federal custody in 2023, but past research from scholars and advocates has estimated about 3,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. prisons annually. “This invisibility,” Rodrigeuz Carey told me, “really contributes to systemic neglect.” In her book, Rodriguez Carey, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Emporia State University in Kansas, counters this historic invisibility by relaying women’s experiences being pregnant, laboring, and giving birth while in prison. Some stories convey the despair and desperation you may expect: Some women recounted purposefully committing crimes in order to be pregnant in prison rather than on the streets; others recalled falling into postpartum depression after being separated from their babies after giving birth while incarcerated. But the book also spotlights the surprising ways women managed to cultivate hope, by hosting makeshift baby showers and making plans for how they would make their children proud once released. I spoke with Rodriguez Carey via Zoom last month about the state of abortion access in prisons post-Roe, the persistent problem of shackling incarcerated people during childbirth, and what most surprised her during the course of her research. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.  I was struck by the fact that some of the women you interviewed deliberately committed crimes in order to have their basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care met in prison during their pregnancies. What do these women’s experiences indicate about the state of pregnancy care in the US more broadly? Well it’s really, really bad care when you have women who are seeking refuge in a carceral system. And that’s not to say that that the care in prison is optimal care by any means, but for those who are living at the margins of society, who are in extreme poverty and don’t know where their next meal is coming from, don’t know where they are staying each night, for them the mark of being a good mother is to ensure that those basic needs are met. And so that means turning to our criminal legal system. It’s really interesting to me that the incarcerated population are the only group of people in the US that are constitutionally guaranteed health care—that really says something.  > “There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the > criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. “ You have some prisons being more progressive with their efforts to provide wraparound services, but then you have other prisons where there’s not a lot of prenatal and postpartum care, and so there’s really just a wide variation of care there from state to state, and even from facility to facility. I think that speaks to the larger picture of inequalities in the US. There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. Even before the Dobbs decision that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, accessing it in prison was difficult. Only two percent of participants in the BJS report had abortions; other research has found an even lower rate. What sort of barriers did incarcerated people face when Roe was still the law of the land? Many states have laws that prohibit any sort of state funding to go toward abortion. That includes travel—so if an incarcerated woman is looking to access an abortion out of state, typically you have to have a correctional officer accompany that woman. That would require state funding, to be in a correctional van for transportation and to provide the salary for the accompanying correctional officer. Many women who are incarcerated may not know that they are even pregnant until they come to prison, if they are living on the streets, for example, and haven’t had access to routine health care in some time. And so by the time they learn of their pregnancy, it’s often too late, because many states have laws that regulate the number of weeks that an abortion can be performed. Many pregnant women in custody remain shackled while laboring and giving birth despite the fact that leading medical groups have denounced this practice. What did your interviewees say this experience was like for them?  They felt like they were caged animals. When you are in the state of giving birth, you are extremely vulnerable. You’re not necessarily at a risk of fleeing; there have been no documented cases to date of a woman trying to escape while in labor. Many of the women that I interviewed had cesarean sections, so they were on the operating table, numb from the waist down—you are not going anywhere at that moment. Most women who are incarcerated are there on non-violent crimes, and even if a woman is pregnant who committed a violent crime, she’s not necessarily posing a risk to society while you’re in that vulnerable state of childbirth, where your legs are in stirrups and you have a correctional officer often in the room. Many of these correctional officers are men, and a lot of the women I interviewed talked about how they had experienced sexual abuse growing up, so that adds just another layer of harm when you’re in this very vulnerable state, often in layers of undress or completely naked. Most states have laws on the books now restricting shackling during delivery. But how widespread of a problem does this remain?  It’s really hard to say. A state may have a policy, but then we know that the policy is often different from the reality of what takes place. Many states that have issued restrictions on shackling still leave it up to correctional officers if there is a point of threat or perceived harm. And I think when we look at the different layers here, of who is more likely to be considered harmful or posing a risk to society, that’s women of color. So you still have these tropes that are persisting behind bars. What about prison nursery programs that allow mothers to parent their newborns in prison—what benefits do they offer and why aren’t they more common? [Editor’s note: There are currently eleven state-run prison nursery programs, plus two more operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons.] The first prison nursery program has actually been in place since 1901, so this is not necessarily new. Women who go through a prison nursery program and have access to that oftentimes there are reduced recidivism rates, there’s improved maternal mental health and fetal health outcomes. Otherwise they’re meeting their children, and they’re saying goodbye all in a span of 24 hours, and so that’s going to have negative health implications for years to come.  There are no national mandates or standardized policies governing the incarceration of pregnant women. As a result, it’s up to individual states—and even specific correctional facilities—to decide whether to invest in such programs. Unfortunately, awareness among policymakers remains limited. Prior to the 1900s, reformatories often emphasized family bonds, allowing incarcerated women to live with their newborns—much like today’s prison nursery programs. But by the 1970s, most states moved toward a more punitive approach, passing legislation that effectively eliminated many of these programs. Some of your interviewees used their incarcerations during pregnancy as a “transformative period” and sought to “optimize pregnancy and birth outcomes” despite their circumstances. Can you say more about how they did so?  Many of the women that I interviewed had been pregnant before. Some of them had also been incarcerated before, but this was the first time they were both pregnant and incarcerated. Many of them talked about how being pregnant and incarcerated was rock bottom, and that this was very much a wake up call to do right by their unborn child. Many of the women interviewed talked about how during previous pregnancies they were out on the streets, doing drugs, getting into trouble left and right. And so when they were in prison, it was really this time where they could focus on their pregnancy. So that was really special for them, and it was a time where they were doing their best to take advantage of different programs and initiatives that they maybe had access to in their prisons, like pregnancy support groups, for example, reading all the books and trying their best to implement that advice. The women talked about how when you’re incarcerated, all you have is time to think and make the best choices for your unborn child. Is there anything that surprised you in doing this research? I think one of the biggest takeaways from me was how much hope is found inside prisons, where you have women coming together, given the absence of maternal healthcare, given the absence of institutional resources and support, creating their own networks of community and care. Food was a huge topic; pregnant women in prison don’t have access all the time to regular and nutritious foods. So you have other women who are incarcerated helping them out and coming together and saying, “Hey, I don’t want my baked potato, you can have it because I know you’re pregnant and you need these calories.” Women are also taking pregnant women, especially the younger ones, under their wings, and saying, “be sure to get a job in the kitchen while you’re incarcerated, because that way you have regular access to food.” So you see these informal networks of support. After a woman gives birth, she’s sent back to prison, often within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth and asked to fall back in line as if nothing has happened, even though her world has just been rocked. So you have women who are incarcerated really coming together and rallying around the pregnant women to provide that support and care. What gives you hope for pregnant people in prisons and their newborns?  The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka has a program called Play Free, which allows incarcerated mothers and grandmothers to spend a day at the children’s museum playing with their kiddo, free of these cages and environments that are not child- and family-friendly at all. It’s been really great to see the transformation, where it started just as a partnership with the Topeka Correctional Facility, and has since expanded to the men’s facilities in Kansas. You have incarcerated fathers as well, and centering the children in all of this is important.

A Texas man accused of putting abortion pills in his partner’s drink has countersued for $100 million, claiming she made the whole thing up. Last month, Autonomy News reported on a lawsuit filed by Liana Davis, a Texas woman who alleged that Christopher Cooprider, a 34-year-old Marine pilot, had given her abortion-inducing medication without her knowledge or consent, causing her to lose her pregnancy. On Wednesday, Cooprider countersued Davis in the same federal court in Corpus Christi, Texas, alleging that Davis’ suit was malicious and intended to cause him emotional distress. When covering the initial complaint, Autonomy News did not name either party, but is doing so now because Cooprider alleges the suit was fraudulent and initiated for retribution and political purposes. Davis is represented by anti-abortion legal activist and former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, and the case is thought to be the first instance of a woman suing for wrongful death from abortion pills. When reached for comment, Mitchell said Thursday, “These are abject lies and we will disprove every one of them in court. Cooprider is guilty as sin and will be held to account for what he did, both in this civil suit and in the upcoming criminal proceedings.” He did not immediately respond to questions about a possible criminal case. In his countersuit, Cooprider says he had a brief sexual relationship with Davis, a 37-year-old who was going through a divorce, and that her behavior escalated to harassment when he expressed that he didn’t want the relationship to continue. After that, Cooprider claims Davis faked multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, and that after she actually became pregnant, she failed to treat medical conditions which themselves could have triggered a miscarriage. Cooprider alleges that Davis concocted her suit after the Corpus Christi Police Department declined to recommend charges based on her allegations against him.  He further alleges that Davis’ lawsuit was filed early on August 11 “so it could be immediately and widely disseminated to national and Texas media outlets that morning” prior to a Texas Senate committee hearing on legislation that would supercharge the state’s existing “bounty hunter” abortion ban, inviting citizens to sue manufacturers and providers of abortion pills and win $100,000 bounties. Davis’ suit was cited in the hearing by Jana Pinson, executive director of Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, a small crisis pregnancy center chain with locations in and around Corpus Christi.  > Cooprider alleges that Davis concocted her suit after the Corpus Christi > Police Department declined to recommend charges based on her allegations > against him. “Just this morning, a lawsuit was filed for wrongful death where a military guy got a next-door neighbor pregnant, tried to force an abortion,” Pinson said during the August 11 hearing. “He ordered in his own name from Aid Access, and then when she wouldn’t take them, he … put 10 pills in her chocolate and she doubled over in pain about 30 minutes later. Then he left her to bleed out while she had to get help to get to the ER.” “This is another avenue of men being able to force abuse on women,” Pinson continued. She mentioned the case again in a hearing on August 22, this time before a House committee.  Davis’ suit also named online abortion provider Aid Access and its founder, Rebecca Gomperts, as defendants. In addition to alleging that they violated wrongful death laws in Texas, the complaint accused them of violating the Comstock Act, a dormant 1873 law that Mitchell and other anti-abortion leaders argue outlaws the mailing of abortion pills. In 2025, the anti-abortion movement has made it a major priority to attack “shield” laws, which protect abortion providers like Aid Access who prescribe abortion pills via telehealth to patients in states where abortion is illegal. Mark Lee Dickson, a prominent anti-abortion activist who was first to announce Davis’ case on social media, also mentioned the case in the August 22 hearing. In his initial social media posts about Davis’ lawsuit, Dickson connected it directly to anti-abortion legislation: “I hope these stories drive us to see more protections pass.” At the time, Dickson said he first heard Davis’ story from a CPC director in Corpus Christi. If Pinson was the person who told Dickson about the story, it’s unclear how she came in contact with Davis in the first place. According to Dickson, he put Davis in touch with “my attorney”—meaning Mitchell, who has recently filed a spate of wrongful death suits related to the use of abortion pills, usually on behalf of men upset about their partners’ abortions. Versions of the abortion pill bounty bill have passed in both chambers of the Texas legislature in recent days. It appears poised to become law. In his suit, Cooprider claims he didn’t coerce Davis, and that she was the one threatening him. He said Davis asked him to order abortion pills for her in February 2025, which he alleges that she never took, and that she began harassing him after he expressed that he didn’t want her to join him at his next military post in North Carolina. One night in early March, he claims, Davis stood outside his house and implied she’d accuse him of sexual assault if he didn’t speak to her. He called 911 for police to do a wellness check and told operators that she’d called him 40 times that day, according to a transcript provided in the counterclaim. He told the operators he took video of her outside his home and added: “And she’s also threatening… she’s saying that I coerced her into taking the abortion pills against her will, and that’s illegal in Texas.” Later on the call, he said Davis told him that she was miscarrying and was sitting “in a pile of her blood in the bathtub.” Cooprider’s filing then notes that “Law enforcement checked on [her] and she was not sitting in blood. She said that she was fine.” However, she was actually pregnant at this time, per an ultrasound on March 21, where a physician said that she had conceived about four weeks earlier. Cooprider claims that Davis invited him over on April 5, at which point she tried to frame him for a coerced abortion by alleging that he slipped abortion pills into her hot chocolate. She claimed she was bleeding profusely, and got a neighbor to drive her to the hospital, where she told staff that Cooprider “drugged” her.  Officers from Corpus Christi Police Department came to the emergency department and opened an investigation. CCPD told the New York Times in August that it shared results with Nueces County District Attorney’s Office, but that, “after careful review, both agencies concluded that the elements of a crime could not be established, and the investigation was subsequently closed as unfounded.”  According to Cooprider’s admittedly melodramatic suit, Davis’ “lethal lies in the malicious allegations now embedded in her made-up complaint read like the screenplay written for Glenn Close in the movie “Fatal Attraction.” Other salacious allegations featured in the complaint include that Davis failed to properly treat a sexually transmitted infection and typhoid fever, either of which could have led to natural miscarriage. Cooprider also alleges that Davis failed to take progesterone prescribed in late March due to a low embryonic heart rate, which his complaint presents as evidence that she did not want to continue the pregnancy. (However, while progesterone is commonly prescribed in an attempt to prevent first trimester miscarriage, evidence doesn’t support the practice except in people with a history of three or more miscarriages.) He also claims she was a heavy drinker and that she continued to drink when her children were in her home despite being ordered not to by family court. Cooprider’s lead attorney is Mikal Watts, a puzzling figure who frequently donates to Democratic politicians, per Federal Election Commission records, but is also listed as a Federalist Society contributor. Watts faced a federal trial in 2016 on 96 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, and identity theft after he was accused of inventing 40,000 victims of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in order to file a class action suit that would have earned him an estimated $40 million. Watts fired his attorney on the eve of trial and chose to represent himself. A jury acquitted him. Cooprider is seeking $100 million in damages, but pledges in his counterclaim to donate any proceeds to the Wounded Warrior Project. Watts and two other attorneys said they are working on the case pro bono. This article was republished from Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Sign up for a free or paid subscription, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.  

This story was produced in partnership with CBS News. A South Texas woman who was arrested on murder charges in 2022 after using medication to terminate her pregnancy has alleged new details about her case against a local sheriff and prosecutors, claiming they violated her constitutional rights. Her August 12 court filing comes as the debate over medication abortion is heating up in Texas, with Attorney General Ken Paxton announcing a new effort to prevent the pill from being mailed into the state. “These abortion drug organizations and radical activists are not above the law, and I have ordered the immediate end of this unlawful conduct,” Paxton said Wednesday. The case of Lizelle Gonzalez was among the first to expose the complexities of criminalizing the use of medication to end a pregnancy. Starr County, located on the southern Texas border, launched an investigation into Gonzalez after hospital staff reported to law enforcement that she had taken medication to induce an abortion when she was 19 weeks pregnant. Three months later, she was indicted and arrested. Gonzalez spent three days in jail before her $500,000 bond was posted, and the charges were ultimately dropped. While Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, it’s not a crime for a woman to obtain or seek abortion care for herself. The state’s restrictions on abortion target physicians and those who aid a woman in obtaining or seeking an abortion, whether it’s surgical or induced by use of abortion drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol. According to new filings in the lawsuit made last week, District Attorney Gocha Ramirez dropped the charges against Gonzalez after public outcry over Gonzalez’s arrest. Included in an exhibit in the lawsuit was a text Ramirez wrote to his son, in which he admitted he’d made a mistake and even called Gonzalez to apologize, stating he “didn’t know what happened.” In the most detailed account to date of the events surrounding Gonzalez’s arrest, her attorneys laid out in the 70-page lawsuit the events that they say led the Starr County district attorney, the assistant DA, and the sheriff to pursue a case against her, even though records suggest prosecutors knew her actions did not violate state law. > “They should have known from the very beginning that the conduct that they > were investigating was not going to ever equal probable cause for homicide.” “They should have known from the very beginning that the conduct that they were investigating was not going to ever equal probable cause for homicide,” said Lauren Johnson, director of the Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The penal code is very clear that a pregnant person cannot be charged with—cannot be guilty of a crime, of a homicide, for ending a pregnancy themselves.” According to the original complaint filed in March 2024, Gonzalez says she went to an emergency room in January 2022 after taking misoprostol, an abortion-inducing medication. Less than an hour after she was discharged, she returned to the hospital with complaints of abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. After an exam detected no fetal cardiac activity, doctors performed a cesarean section to deliver a stillborn fetus. After the procedure, a nurse at the hospital called 911 and reported the procedure to local police, who then contacted the Starr County Sheriff’s Office. The nurse later said the hospital’s administrators directed her to report the incident “because, she said, abortions could now be considered murder due to a ‘change in the law,’” according to the complaint. “It is not an overstatement to say that Lizelle’s life was entirely upended by what happened to her,” said Johnson, who is representing Gonzalez in the lawsuit. “She wanted to live her life and didn’t want to be criminalized and have her mugshot in her local community. And have something that should have been a very personal decision be something that was made public.” In July, the Southern District Court of Texas denied Starr County officials’ attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed after the prosecutors and sheriff raised claims of absolute and qualified immunity, respectively. The immunity doctrine has been developed by the courts to restrict the legal liability of government officials, such as law enforcement, judges, and prosecutors. Absolute immunity applies a complete shield from legal action regardless of the legality or constitutionality of the official’s actions. Qualified immunity, however, cannot shield a government actor, like law enforcement, if they violate “clearly established” statutory or constitutional rights. However, the court filings allege that all three county officials named in the suit—Ramirez, first assistant prosecutor Alexandria Barrera, and Sheriff Rene Fuentes—violated “clearly established” constitutional rights when they pursued a murder charge and arrest for an action the law clearly states is not a crime. And they allege that the prosecutors acted outside of their prosecutorial capacity by directing the investigation and providing legal advice to drive the indictment—which Gonzalez argues would exempt them from any immunity. The ACLU says the hundreds of pages of evidence it has gathered contradict the claim by county officials that they didn’t know that it was not lawful to pursue a murder charge against Gonzalez. In a sworn deposition, an investigator with the sheriff’s office testified that she wasn’t ready to charge Gonzalez with murder but was instructed to do so by Barrera. “No practices have been put in place or conduct changed to prevent something like this from happening or being done differently in the future,” says Johnson. “I think that part has been especially alarming and really does highlight the need for ways to shine a light on this conduct and also really force elected officials to follow the law when they’re using the immense power that they have.”  The Starr County District Attorney’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment. This story was reported by CBS News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

In the fall of 2018, Tia Goins was a new mother in crisis, facing eviction, unable to find room in a shelter, and confronting the prospect of homelessness in a Detroit winter—with her three-month-old baby. “It was like, what do I do?” Goins said earlier this year. “I just—I just didn’t want her to be homeless with me.” In a moment of panic, she Googled adoption options and clicked on the first link that came up: a website for Brighter Adoptions, an agency in Layton, Utah. Goins was hesitant—adoption wasn’t something she had ever seriously considered—but the agency representative was persistent. “The lady just kept calling, kept calling,” Goins said. Within 24 hours of Goins’ first phone call, Brighter Adoptions had flown her from Detroit to Utah to place her child for adoption. Though Goins texted the owner of the agency saying she was having second thoughts, the process moved quickly: Within two days, agency representatives were at Goins’ hotel room door with the final adoption paperwork. Goins’ story is the subject of an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones) that aired Thursday on PBS News Hour. As I wrote in the January/February issue of Mother Jones, Utah has become a hub for domestic adoption, with agencies flying in new or expecting mothers from across the country to place their children. The agencies often offer cash stipends and free lodging to mothers—many of whom, like Goins, are in desperate financial and housing situations. This cottage industry is enabled by so-called “adoption-friendly” laws in Utah that expedite the process. Many states build in protections for birth parents, allowing birth mothers to change their minds days or even weeks after signing adoption paperwork, and requiring that birth fathers have a chance to contest the adoption. In Utah, such safeguards don’t exist. Once the papers are signed, the decision is irreversible. In addition, the children of unwed birth fathers can be placed for adoption in Utah without their notification or consent. And finally, Utah is the only state where finalized adoptions can’t be dismissed even if the adoption was fraudulent. > “In confusion,” says Texas A&M professor Malinda Seymore, “there is profit.” Agencies like Brighter Adoptions say they’re providing needed services, centering the needs of birth mothers and finding loving homes for their children. In an email, Brighter Adoptions owner Sandi Quick said that the agency ensures that mothers “fully understand the implications of adoption.” But critics argue that moving mothers away from their support systems to a state that expedites adoptions makes mothers more vulnerable. Plus, they say, the adoption industry is fueled by agencies, lawyers, and facilitators that often profit off of the process. “I think domestic, private, infant action in America toes that line of legalized trafficking,” says Ashley Mitchell, director of Knee to Knee, which runs support groups for birth parents. Over the past decade, several states, particularly those with restrictive abortion laws, have passed “adoption-friendly” legislation. Georgia, Kentucky, and Indiana have shortened the period during which a birth mother can change her mind; Virginia and South Dakota put limits on the rights of birth fathers; Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas require schools to provide adoption education. Texas also has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign promoting adoption. Malinda Seymore, a law professor at Texas A&M University, says that the dramatic state-by-state differences in protections for birth parents benefits the adoption industry. “In confusion, there is profit,” she says. “If you can move a birth mother to a different state and take advantage of more favorable laws for your client, why wouldn’t you?”