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.”

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.”

This article is a collaboration with 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. Crisis pregnancy centers have played a central role in the anti-abortion movement since the 1960s, often misleading and confusing people seeking abortions while purporting to help them. They mimic the appearance of abortion clinics, with similar-sounding names and even lookalike logos. Their volunteers sometimes pose as clinic staff to divert abortion patients from getting care. Their websites are teeming with disinformation, including claims that abortion is unsafe or linked to future mental illness, breast cancer, and fertility issues. “A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby,” Robert Pearson, founder of the very first CPC in the US, once declared. Abortion rights advocates have long called on lawmakers to rein in CPCs and their misleading practices. But a 2018 Supreme Court decision struck down a California consumer-disclosure law’s attempt to do just that, making it virtually impossible for states to enact regulations that single out CPCs.  Soon after, pro–abortion rights legal scholars suggested a new approach: to go after pregnancy centers for false advertising. This regulatory strategy seemed like it would be a slam dunk, particularly thanks to a CPC practice that has rapidly become crucial to the anti-abortion movement’s strategy: abortion pill “reversal,” an unproven medical protocol that CPCs claim can halt a medication abortion about two-thirds of the time. The medical consensus on APR is clear: It’s not possible to “reverse” the effects of the abortion drug mifepristone, and attempting to do so may even be dangerous. To blue-state legislators and attorneys general, the legal issue was also straightforward: Making false promises—especially when those claims could hurt people—is illegal under a host of state and federal laws that ban misleading and deceptive advertising practices. But three years after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, efforts to regulate CPCs for false advertising appear poised to backfire spectacularly. In fact, by pursuing pregnancy centers based on their promotion of APR, well-intentioned Democrats may have unwittingly set the stage for the anti-abortion movement’s next great Supreme Court victory. In its term beginning this month, the high court will hear a case stemming from New Jersey’s attempt to subpoena information—including scientific evidence to back up claims about APR—from First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a CPC chain with five locations throughout the state. In a brief, First Choice compares the subpoena to Southern states’ attempts to force the NAACP to produce member lists in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Technically, the case has nothing to do with APR or other questionable CPC practices. It’s about a specific legal fine point: Can CPCs run straight to federal court to fight an attorney general’s subpoena, as First Choice did, or must they first sue in state court?  > The fear is that, if far-right legal activists succeed, states could > ultimately be barred from intervening in any way when CPCs advertise unproven > medical treatments like APR. 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 APR and other questionable practices entirely. Three cases are waiting in the wings. This summer, a Trump-appointed federal judge permanently blocked Colorado from enforcing a 2023 ban on APR against two plaintiffs who sued to block it: a CPC and a nurse practitioner. The first-of-its-kind statute labeled APR a deceptive trade practice. Meanwhile, in New York and California, federal court battles are raging between state attorneys general and CPCs, this time over state claims that merely advertising abortion pill “reversal” is fraudulent and misleading. The fear is that, if far-right legal activists succeed, states could ultimately be barred from intervening in any way when CPCs advertise unproven medical treatments like APR. That could grant CPCs an unfettered right to spread medical disinformation—no matter how much it may harm vulnerable people navigating an already deadly post-Dobbs landscape.  In all of these cases, CPCs are represented by the far-right legal juggernaut Alliance Defending Freedom, which wrote the Mississippi abortion ban the court used to overturn Roe and has played a leading role in major anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ litigation in recent years. This includes NIFLA v. Becerra, the 2018 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a California law that required unlicensed CPCs to disclose their lack of licensure, and licensed pregnancy centers to provide information about family planning services.  Recordings from a March CPC industry conference—made by an attendee and shared exclusively with Autonomy News—confirm that ADF and allied law firms view abortion pill “reversal” as a linchpin in their strategy to expand legal and religious protections for the centers. The conference was hosted by the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, an advocacy organization that provides legal counsel, education, and training for more than 1,800 member CPCs across the US; it was also the lead plaintiff in NIFLA v. Becerra. ADF senior counsel Kevin Theriot joked that NIFLA “seems to be our primary client these days,” and suggested that another legal victory is imminent.  Peter Breen, head of litigation at the Thomas More Society—another right-wing law firm that works closely with the anti-abortion movement—told the audience that the goal is to win court decisions that “protect you a little more vigorously, maybe, than you’re being protected right now.”  In all of these cases, ADF asserts that by attempting to regulate CPCs, blue states are “chilling” their First Amendment rights.  But conference recordings also reveal that, behind closed doors, many anti-abortion doctors are reluctant to embrace APR, despite its ubiquity in their movement. The recordings feature rare admissions about the challenges and risks associated with the experimental treatment, including mention of side effects not included in official case reports. These comments raise questions about how, exactly, CPCs plan to capitalize on any newly won freedoms, and whether anti-abortion leaders will plow ahead with APR when even their own medical experts are hesitant. The FDA–approved protocol for medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, a hormone essential for pregnancy; and misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and expel the pregnancy tissue. In abortion pill “reversal,” patients who have taken mifepristone but haven’t yet taken misoprostol are prescribed progesterone under the theory that the hormone will reverse the effects of mifepristone and “save” the pregnancy.  This theory was inspired by the longstanding use of progesterone to prevent miscarriage in early stages of pregnancy—even though randomized controlled trials have found that progesterone therapy has little benefit for most miscarrying patients. The man behind the hypothesis is Dr. George Delgado, a family medicine doctor and prominent conservative activist based in the San Diego area. > As is often the case in disinformation campaigns, there is a kernel of truth > to the anti-abortion movement’s claim that pregnancy can continue after taking > mifepristone. But APR has nothing to do with it. Delgado founded the Steno Institute, an anti-abortion research organization that counts San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone among its advisers. He sits on the board of the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs and is the medical director for a CPC called Culture of Life Family Services. Most recently, he was a plaintiff in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, in which anti-abortion medical groups unsuccessfully challenged the FDA’s 25-year-old approval of mifepristone, plus more recent regulatory changes that have vastly expanded access to the drug. ADF represented Delgado and the other doctors in the case. Delgado published the first report on APR in 2012—a case study with just six patients, finding that four of them carried their pregnancies to term. (Case reports are considered among the weakest forms of scientific evidence, per a widely used ranking system.) In 2018, Delgado published a larger case report in the journal Issues in Law & Medicine, which has direct ties to AAPLOG. Of 754 patients initially given progesterone, 547 remained in the study and 257 later gave birth, Delgado claimed. As is often the case in disinformation campaigns, there is a kernel of truth to the anti-abortion movement’s claim that pregnancy can continue after taking mifepristone. But APR has nothing to do with it. “We know that mifepristone, by itself, is not a very effective abortion-inducing medication,” says Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco who is the director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health and the lead author on a 2015 systematic review of the evidence on APR. In one early French trial of mifepristone, for example, 23 percent of participants who took the now-standard dose of mifepristone alone remained pregnant. Supposed APR “success stories” may simply reflect the fact that mifepristone doesn’t work well on its own—this is precisely why it’s used in combination with misoprostol. In Grossman’s view, the anti-abortion movement’s promotion of APR is akin to an “unmonitored research project.” In the US, he adds, there is a “very ugly history of experimenting on people from marginalized groups”—and people who have abortions disproportionately belong to such communities.  > In Grossman’s view, the anti-abortion movement’s promotion of APR is akin to > an “unmonitored research project.” Still, after Delgado’s purported discovery, anti-abortion legislators moved quickly, eventually passing laws in more than a dozen states that required abortion providers to inform their patients of the possibility of “reversing” their medication abortions. (Many of those states now ban abortion entirely.) Delgado went on to found the Abortion Pill Rescue Network, a progesterone-prescription hotline that’s now run by the CPC organization Heartbeat International. In public, anti-abortion groups boast about hordes of women who they claim have changed their minds and successfully “reversed” their medication abortions. In June, Heartbeat International announced that the Abortion Pill Rescue Network has saved “more than 7,000 lives”—up from the “6,000 lives and counting” it claimed in November 2024. It’s impossible to know whether or not these statistics are true. CPCs have a history of inflating the number of clients they serve and the value of services they provide. Creating a perception that demand for “reversal” is exploding reinforces the longstanding myth that many people are unsure of their decision to have an abortion. It’s also a conservative answer to the increasing popularity of medication abortion, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US in 2023—double the rate from 2014. But at the NIFLA conference, several prominent anti-abortion physicians seemed ambivalent about APR, even as CPC leaders projected bravado about the legal cases and dismissed potential safety concerns. Based on back-and-forth during two sessions—a medical roundtable and a legal Q&A—it appears that many CPCs aren’t even providing APR on site and are instead referring patients to the Heartbeat hotline. This is ironic considering the anti-abortion movement’s strident opposition to telehealth for abortion pills. But it tracks with the results of a recent study, which found that only 3.8 percent of CPCs were advertising on-site progesterone prescriptions in 2024.  During the medical roundtable, Virginia-based family physician and Heartbeat hotline provider Karen Poehailos claimed that demand for APR “has been going through the roof.” A decade ago, she’d get five requests per year, she said; in the three months before the conference, she said she’d written “13 or 14” prescriptions. (Given that there were roughly 643,000 medication abortions in the US in 2023, three to five attempted reversals per month is hardly a huge number.) Poehailos acknowledged that growth in abortion pill use may help explain the rise in APR requests. ”Women can get these as easily as clicking online,” she said. “They did not have to think about as much before they started the abortion.”  In addition to serving as NIFLA’s assistant medical director, Poehailos is also a telehealth provider for FEMM, a fertility tracking app whose development was funded by an anti-abortion billionaire. She estimated that in the past decade, only about three of her APR patients were local, meaning she was able to see them in person. “The rest of them have been through telemedicine,” she said, which requires her to be extra careful. “When these women are so far from me…I document like crazy, and I pray that God protects me,” she said. It also helps to have “friends at ADF,” Poehailos said, apparently referring to Alliance Defending Freedom. > “The majority of the women I have worked with, even if [APR] is successful, > will have some bleeding…“If you see a subchorionic [hemorrhage], that’s kind > of expected. You pray it’s not a huge one.” One of the challenges of APR, Poehailos said, is dealing with a common side effect, bleeding. “The majority of the women I have worked with, even if [APR] is successful, will have some bleeding,” she noted—specifically subchorionic hematoma or hemorrhage, a relatively common condition in which blood collects between the uterine wall and the outside of the gestational sac. Usually the bleeding is mild and resolves on its own. But this outcome isn’t reported in the papers that anti-abortion physicians have published on APR, Grossman points out. “If you see a subchorionic, that’s kind of expected. You pray it’s not a huge one,” Poehailos added.  During their discussion, Poehailos and two other doctors also lamented the quality of some of the medical testing at CPCs they’ve worked with, including ultrasounds and even basic urine pregnancy tests. “We want to serve these women well, we want to serve them in the heart of Jesus,” Poehailos said, “but we are providing medical services under someone’s license, so please … I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. You need to be serving these women better than this.” Neither NIFLA nor Poehailos responded to requests for comment. Part of the problem may be that CPCs appear to be having trouble attracting specialized professionals. At one point, Sandy Christiansen, medical director for Care Net, another CPC umbrella organization, reassured the crowd that they needn’t find an OB-GYN to be their medical director. Any type of doctor, even a pathologist or orthopedic surgeon, could do the job, she said. “All doctors get trained in women’s medicine to some extent…they can read a scan,” she said. Christiansen didn’t respond to a request for comment. But ultrasound training has only recently become common in US medical schools, and obstetric ultrasound is even more specialized. Indeed, one audience member, who identified herself as a registered diagnostic medical sonographer, said her center’s medical director was a psychiatrist. As a result, “she puts a lot of trust into us.” Poehailos acknowledged that some physicians refuse to provide APR themselves. “Some centers, their doctors are not comfortable prescribing, and they just want to be able to provide ultrasounds for doctors who do,” she said.  During the legal Q&A, some audience members expressed concern about potential repercussions associated with advertising or offering APR. But lawyers on the panel didn’t seem worried.  “I think everyone should go get a [t-]shirt that says ‘It’s just progesterone,’” said NIFLA attorney Angie Thomas, to laughter from the audience. Based on the discussion, the claim that state laws are “chilling” CPCs’ speech appears grounded more in legal strategy than in reality. In California, for example, Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Heartbeat International and a CPC chain called RealOptions Obria over their claims about APR. In a related case, ADF is representing NIFLA and another CPC—neither of which Bonta sued—arguing that the attorney general’s actions chill these organizations’ First Amendment rights. As a result, NIFLA’s “official recommendation” to pregnancy centers in California is not to offer APR, said Anne O’Connor, the organization’s vice president of legal affairs—not because CPCs’ rights really are being “chilled,” but because claiming so strengthens their ongoing case against Bonta. “ADF recommended, you know, it’s better to go conservative in that, to allege that our First Amendment rights have been chilled by what the AG is doing,” O’Connor said. “So you would suggest not telling clients about [APR]?” asked an audience member who said she was affiliated with a CPC in California.  “I told you that’s the official,” said O’Connor. The audience laughed, seeming to pick up on a hint. Other lawyers also seemed to admit that CPCs are free to make APR referrals at the same time they claim they’re being censored. ADF’s Theriot said CPCs could keep giving out information about abortion pill “reversal” and making referrals. “There’s a difference between advertising it,” he said, “and giving people information about the possible availability.” “I think most of the centers in California are still doing it,” added Breen of Thomas More Society, which is representing Heartbeat against Bonta, suggesting that Bonta’s suit has not actually changed CPCs’ behavior. Breen did not respond to a request for comment. In an emailed statement, Theriot said ADF “will fearlessly stand alongside pregnancy centers in their ministry to support pregnant women and their unborn babies” and in their legal fights against “ideologically and politically driven attorneys general.” “We remain confident that our clients’ First Amendment rights will be protected—even if that means taking these cases all the way to the US Supreme Court.” While CPCs have been part of the anti-abortion movement for decades, their numbers have skyrocketed in the past 15 years as Republicans have consolidated their power and waged all-out war on reproductive rights. By June 2022, when Roe v. Wade fell, CPCs outnumbered abortion clinics by as many as 15 to 1 in some states. And since Dobbs, CPCs have received cash injections from state governments and private philanthropists alike, now raking in nearly $1.5 billion a year. But as the industry has grown, criticism has intensified. Abortion rights advocates have worked hard to inform the public about CPCs’ deceptive practices, branding them as “fake clinics”—a label that’s stuck. Encouraged by organizations like NIFLA and Heartbeat, CPCs have responded by trying to become more “medicalized”—bringing in more licensed staff and offering more medical services, such as testing, and less commonly, treatment for sexually transmitted infections. In addition to conferring an aura of legitimacy, medicalization has the potential to open up new funding streams. For example, RealOptions Obria Medical Clinics—one of the chains Bonta sued—operates licensed facilities that accept the state’s version of Medicaid.  > Abortion rights advocates have worked hard to inform the public about CPCs’ > deceptive practices, branding them as “fake clinics”—a label that’s stuck. > CPCs have responded by trying to become more “medicalized.” Reproductive health experts generally see abortion pill “reversal” as part of this medicalization trend. APR also gives the anti-abortion movement another way—besides lawsuits and legislation—to fight back against the soaring popularity of abortion pills in the post-Roe era. While growing numbers of patients have turned to telehealth providers for abortion care, some three-quarters of abortions—including many via pills—still involve at least one in-person visit to a clinic. And many of those patients are encountering CPC volunteers who try to convince them to “reverse” their abortions by taking progesterone instead of misoprostol. At least one abortion provider in the South says she has begun to hear from patients who’ve been drawn in by APR after appointments at her clinics. Calla Hales is the executive director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, which operates four clinics across North Carolina and Georgia. While APR is more than a decade old, in Hales’ experience, the phenomenon of patients getting ensnared by it is relatively new. “I would have never been able to point to a single anecdote prior to Dobbs,” she says. But this year alone, patients have called her clinics at least six or seven times in as many months after someone affiliated with a CPC convinced them not to take their misoprostol. Some  patients then called Hales’ clinic back wanting to “reverse” their “reversal,” a situation in which there is no medical protocol, so health-care providers are flying blind.  In one case, Hales says, a patient traveled to one of her clinics from a state with a total abortion ban. After they returned home, family members took them to a CPC, which tried to convince them to “reverse” the medication abortion they had already started. In the other instances, patients were approached by CPC volunteers standing outside one of Hales’ clinics. A patient who is duped by the “reversal” sham, Hales adds, is likely to have to travel out of their home state again to complete their abortion—or be forced to seek follow-up care at an emergency department, where doctors may be hostile, lack adequate abortion training or both. “It’s really heartbreaking,” she says, “because there’s so much misinformation as it stands, and it’s really hard for patients to navigate getting abortion care in the first place.”

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.