Elon Musk Wants to "Make Women Sad" to Save the Country
2.5.26
Click to skip ahead: Louisiana AG Plans to Sue New York and California; Texas Care Crisis; In the States: South Carolina, West Virginia, Nebraska & More; The Forced Birth Brigade: From Elon Musk to Michigan Extremists; Abortion Misinformation in WaPo & the NYT
Louisiana AG Plans to Sue New York and California
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is on a roll: after bringing criminal charges against two blue state providers who allegedly shipped abortion pills into the state, the Republican AG plans to sue California and New York for refusing to extradite the doctors.
Murrill says a federal lawsuit is the only way to “address them protecting people who are openly committed to nullifying and violating our criminal laws in our state.”
For those who need a refresher: Murrill has issued extradition requests for Dr. Remy Coeytaux in California and Dr. Margaret Carpenter in New York. But both states have shield laws that protect providers from out-of-state prosecutions and civil suits, and Govs. Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul have made clear they have no plans to turn over the doctors. (Hochul put it plainly, saying, “there’s no way in hell” she would extradite Carpenter.)
Republican attorneys general are in a race to get shield laws and telehealth abortion medication in front of the Supreme Court, and Murrill appears to be leading the charge. In addition to the extradition requests, the Republican AG is also suing the FDA to ban telemedicine. Most recently, she testified in front of a Senate committee about the supposed dangers of abortion pills.
Now, Murrill claims that mailing the medication to Louisiana is like sending a gun or fentanyl across state lines that end up killing a child.
We’ll keep you updated about what happens next.
Texas Care Crisis
Since Texas enacted a six-week abortion ban in 2021, the law has killed several women (that we know about) and the maternity rate has spiked by 56%. It’s no secret why: doctors are forced to take a wait-and-see approach when treating patients with life-threatening pregnancies, holding off on emergency abortions until women are on the brink of death. Sometimes, that delay can kill.
Now, five years after the law passed, the Texas Medical Board is offering physicians guidance on when they can intervene to provide life-saving abortions. The guidance, obtained by ProPublica, offers different scenarios—like ectopic pregnancy or a patient’s water breaking too early—and advises how healthcare providers should act.
But the medical experts who spoke to ProPublica are critical of the training. They point out the document’s examples are far more straightforward than the complicated medical emergencies physicians face in real life. “They’re taking years and years of medical training and experience on how to manage these cases and summarizing it in 43 slides,” said Texas OBGYN Dr. Tony Ogburn.
Worth noting? The Texas Medical Board is made of members appointed by the governor, none of whom is an OBGYN.
The training also claims “the legal risk of prosecution is extremely low,” which is at obvious odds with Attorney General Ken Paxton’s obsessive legal warfare targeting midwives, abortion funds, out-of-state abortion providers—even patients. Who could forget when Paxton fought to prevent Kate Cox from accessing emergency abortion in 2023?
Here’s the truth: there is no guidance in the world that can protect pregnant women if basic, life-saving medical care has to exist under the specter of criminalization and state surveillance. As Kate Cox put it:
“I’m grateful for my doctors. Their hands were tied in many ways. The problem isn’t our doctors. It’s that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate.”
Extra Credit: In some states, the “guidance” for doctors on how to provide life-saving abortion is crafted by the nation’s most extremist anti-choice organizations. Read Abortion, Every Day’s explainer below for more.
While we’re breaking down the Texas care crisis: a rider in last year’s state budget set aside a tiny—like, $15,000-tiny—sum for a year-long study of maternal health and mortality in state jails. The study comes amid stories of incarcerated women dying, giving birth alone in their cells, or miscarrying due to medical neglect and mistreatment.
The Texas Commission on Jail Standards reports there are over 400 pregnant women in county jails each month—and from September to November 2025, tracked 42 deliveries, 28 miscarriages, and one ectopic pregnancy. These numbers are devastating. Yet instead of confronting the conditions inside Texas’s jails and prisons—or asking why pregnant women are being jailed at all—so-called “pro-life” leaders are pouring their energy into banning abortion even further.
And remember, while the state allocated just $15,000 to research why incarcerated pregnant women are dying and miscarrying, it gave anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers $140 million in 2024 alone.
In the States: South Carolina, West Virginia, Nebraska & More
Students for Life—the extremist organization that insists abortion pills have infected the water supply—is working with GOP lawmakers in several states to ban telemedicine abortion. Their bills are progressing at an alarming rate: South Carolina’s House of Representatives just advanced H. 4760, which would classify abortion pills as a controlled substance. (Louisiana did the same in 2024.)
The bill would punish providers or other helpers with prison time, and would make it illegal to fundraise for abortion pills.
Despite the naked extremism, several Republicans opposed the legislation because it doesn’t go far enough. Why? Because it wouldn’t charge the woman.
“We need prosecutors in this state to have a backbone when it comes to protecting life,” state Rep. John McCravy said, calling for women who have abortions to be jailed, charged with murder, potentially executed for their abortions. The ‘abolitionist,’ fetal personhood group Equal Protection South Carolina said the state shouldn’t “settle for symbolic legislation.”
This is who the anti-abortion movement is. Most Republicans may try to distance themselves from this language, but it’s a disagreement on strategy: even their supposedly ‘reasonable’ abortion bans, which don’t charge providers or patients as murderers, are already killing women.
Abortion pills are also under fire in West Virginia, where the Senate just advanced SB 173—a bill that would make it a felony to send abortion pills into the state by mail or by courier. (West Virginia’s Senate passed a similar bill last session, but it died in the House of Delegates.)
Students for Life’s Thomas Dinkel testified in favor of the bill this week, calling on West Virginia to “address abortion pill traffic” and “close this dangerous loophole.”
As we’ve noted before—terms like ‘abortion trafficking’ and ‘loophole’ have become conservative buzzwords. The idea is to make it appear like doctors are doing something sneaky or underhanded by mailing the medication, rather than the truth: they’re doing their job, and providing healthcare.
Reminder: A similar bill just passed Indiana’s Senate just last week, and Oklahoma is considering its own version of the legislation. And we know why these bills are everywhere right now: telemedicine medication abortion accounts for nearly 30% of all abortions nationwide—and nearly all abortions in banned states like West Virginia. Republicans want to trap people under their extreme laws, and cut off any means for women to escape them.
In some better news, Nebraska’s legislature narrowly rejected a bad-faith ‘coercion’ bill after a four-day filibuster. LB 669 would have updated the state’s abortion-related informed consent laws to require screenings for reproductive coercion and domestic abuse—but only for those seeking abortion care within the 12-week window they can do so in the state.
The bill might have seemed bipartisan, but it extends from a broader anti-abortion propaganda campaign attempting to frame all abortions as ‘coerced abortions’—even while abortion restrictions are more likely to harm abuse victims.
Quick Hits:
The girls are fighting: Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is criticizing a GOP state lawmaker for working for a law firm that represents Planned Parenthood;
Colorado abortion rights amendment just took effect, and KGNU has an explainer on what comes next;
And the Missouri House has passed a nightmare ‘Born Alive’ bill. Read AED on why this legislation is so dangerous and cruel.
The Forced Birth Brigade: From Elon Musk to Michigan Extremists
Just when you thought it was impossible to be any more disgusted with right-wing billionaires! The notoriously birth-rate-obsessed Elon Musk co-signed a social media post this week declaring, “It breaks my heart to say but in order to save this country we are probably going to have to do things that make women sad :(.”
Musk responded, “True words.”
He’s trying to be coy, but we know exactly what Musk and his ilk are calling for: forcing women to have babies. Forced pregnancy of any kind—by a man or by the state—is gender-based violence. And while Musk would deny this characterization, what he’s advocating for is sexual violence.
The far-right—particularly those who push for the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory—loves to wax poetic about the importance of all of us ‘making sacrifices’ to save this country. But by that, they mean they want women to make sacrifices. And by that, they mean they want women to become pregnant and give birth no matter what—even if it costs us our humanity, dignity, or lives. (Keep an eye on your inboxes tomorrow: Jessica is finishing up a column on Musk’s comment and the connection it has to a Heritage Foundation plan targeting young women.)
The violence of Musk’s forced birth ideology is inseparable from rising anti-abortion violence nationwide—like in Michigan, where Renee Chelian, the director of three Michigan clinics, says anti-abortion protesters are growing increasingly aggressive. Chelian attributes this to Donald Trump pardoning two dozen anti-abortion activists, and his DOJ’s directive to no longer enforce the FACE Act. (At least, not to protect abortion clinics: the agency just invoked the federal clinic protection law to prosecute journalist Don Lemon.)
Here’s something telling: Chelian noted that more and more, she hears anti-abortion activists invoke false claims that patients are being ‘coerced’ into abortions to justify their harassment—all while perpetrating coercion, themselves:
“They don’t care that women are making this choice. They make all kinds of false claims that women are being dragged in by their parents or their husbands. We don’t do abortions on anyone who doesn’t want one. These people are the ones trying to use coercion. We’re medical professionals. We would never coerce a patient, and we don’t do abortions on patients who are undecided.”
It’s a good reminder that anti-abortion talking points don’t stop at the statehouse—they trickle down to everyday activists—and that the movement is relentlessly disciplined about its messaging.
Some related recommended reading: This personal essay in HuffPost from a woman who says her abortion saved her from her abusive relationship.
Abortion Misinformation in WaPo & the NYT
Our election year hellscape is in full swing, as evidenced by the latest 2026 preview by the Washington Post—where two male reporters attribute Democrats’ 2024 loss to a “message that centered on abortion access.”
The reality? Abortion rights are more popular than nearly any other political issue. Over 80% of voters say the government shouldn’t intervene in pregnancy, and abortion rights ballot measures have been winning in deep red states despite massive barriers.
There’s no shortage of reasons Democrats came up short in 2024, but supporting reproductive rights is nowhere on that list. Certainly not when Donald Trump himself won in part because he claimed to be pro-choice—insisting he’d veto a national ban, hinting that he opposed Florida’s 6-week ban, and saying he gave abortion “back to the states.” (The truth, of course, is that Trump and Congressional Republicans have defunded reproductive health providers across the U.S., pushing care out of reach no matter where someone lives.)
Not to be outdone, the New York Times just published a lengthy conversation with Lila Rose of the extremist group Live Action—which opposes birth control and says that IVF “kills more babies than abortion.” This is also the group behind deceptively-edited videos targeting Planned Parenthood, and ‘Baby Olivia’ legislation that forces anti-abortion propaganda videos into public schools.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Rose was interviewed by columnist and Interesting Times podcast host, Ross Douthat. The last time we heard from him was when he publicly pondered whether women “ruined” the workplace.
Douthat and Rose’s conversation in the supposed paper of record is bonkers and wildly offensive—normalized and sanitized under the credibility of the Times, rather than published in a place like Breitbart.
Apparently the Times doesn’t fact-check anymore, either: the interview platforms a range of baseless claims from Rose, who says she uncovered extensive child abuse at Planned Parenthood facilities, repeatedly equates birth control and abortion, and argues that abortion is never medically necessary—a position that justifies killing pregnant women experiencing severe complications.
Instead of listening to the hour-long conversation, I highly recommend re-reading Jessica’s piece:
Beyond the obvious disturbing criminal penalties in this bill, I’m increasingly concerned about the legislative trend to suppress free speech. Making it illegal to fundraise for abortion care criminalizes advocacy itself. Fundraising, organizing, and speaking publicly about contested issues are core forms of civic participation. When the state begins restricting those activities, it erodes the basic First Amendment principle that citizens are free to advocate for causes they believe in, even controversial ones.
No state should acquiesce even if (when) SCROTUS decides Texas and Louisiana are entitled to extradite, tell SCROTUS pound sand you made your decision now enforce it. Business as usual is usualing us right into the graveyard.