Exposing Republicans' Bad-Faith Abortion 'Coercion' Obsession

They're pretending to care about abuse victims

Jerry Rodriguez has a long history of abuse. The Texas man pleaded guilty in 2006 to assaulting a woman he lived with. He pleaded guilty again in 2009 for repeatedly threatening to kill a different woman over the phone. Rodriguez was later accused of assaulting and threatening to kill his girlfriend in 2024. A police report says he attacked her in a motel—that he tried to strangle her (the highest predictor for murder), slammed her on the floor, and punched her at least 12 times before she was hospitalized.

Eight months later, Rodriguez resurfaced as the plaintiff in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by notorious anti-abortion lawyer Jonathan Mitchell—claiming, of all things, that he was the victim, and that he’s seeking to protect his girlfriend from ‘coerced’ abortion.

Mitchell claims that pills shipped from California enabled a different man to ‘coerce’ Rodriguez’s girlfriend into ending her pregnancy, and he is leveraging that allegation to push for a sweeping, national abortion ban. Before Rodriguez, Mitchell represented a different Texas man who sued over his ex-wife’s abortion in 2023—also outed as an abuser—to do the same.

This is the anti-abortion movement’s endgame, and the sole reason they pretend to care about ‘coercion’: to ban abortion.

The suit, which casually omits Rodriguez’s domestic violence record, also asks the court to prevent his girlfriend from having another abortion. It begs the question: if forcing someone to take abortion pills is reproductive coercion, what do you call forcing—coercing—people to stay pregnant?

In a survey from the National Domestic Violence Hotline, victims reported that their partners have blocked them from taking abortion pills by threatening to commit suicide, lighting the pills on fire, physically locking them up, and threatening to harm them or their loved ones. Within a year of the end of Roe v. Wade, calls to the Hotline involving reproductive coercion doubled, abortion bans resulted in at least 10,000 additional incidents of intimate partner violence, and there were tens of thousands of rape-induced pregnancies in banned states.

Is this not ‘coercion’?

What about the Texas woman whose abusive partner called the police when she self-managed an abortion? Cops attempted to find her using an automated license plate reader that accessed over 80,000 cameras. Isn’t that abuse?

As Anne Glatz, co-director Sanctuary for Families’ Reproductive Abuse Initiative, has told AED, abortion bans are “a form of state-sponsored gender-based violence in itself.”

Yet, ‘coercion’ has rapidly become the most oft-used anti-abortion talking point and political strategy since the end of Roe.

The anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, for instance, falsely claims at least one in four abortions are coerced and at least 70% are “unwanted,” and Live Action recently rolled out a video series featuring women who say their abortions were coerced. Last month, an entire U.S. Senate committee hearing about the safety of abortion pills revolved around ‘coerced abortion’ claims. Louisiana’s lawsuit to ban telemedicine abortion—and the state’s efforts to extradite two out-of-state doctors—are based on accusations of ‘coerced’ abortions. And when a mom in the state was arrested for helping her teenager obtain abortion pills, the attorney general and governor both claimed the case was really about ‘coercion’.

All too often, anti-abortion leaders’ performative claims to care about reproductive coercion are taken at face-value by mainstream media—and even pro-choice politicians who take their anti-abortion colleagues’ supposed concerns in good faith.

That’s where Abortion, Every Day comes in. We’ve been tracking the ‘coercion’ trend for years, and want to help you connect the dots. So let’s get into it.

How we got here

Banning telemedicine is key: Right now, telemedicine abortion pills account for nearly 30% of all abortions—and nearly all abortions in banned states. That’s why the right is so desperate to obstruct access to the pills: abortion pills are the primary means through which women have been able to sidestep state bans.

But Republican lawmakers, who know abortion bans are massively unpopular and that they suffer from a festering PR crisis with women voters, need to frame restrictions as if they’re in women’s best interest.

One way to do this? To sweepingly equate abortion—and abortion pills, specifically—with abuse.

In 2023, AED reported that anti-abortion leaders had identified ‘coercion’ as their most effective talking point to stigmatize and attack abortion rights. As one activist put it, “No one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.”

Dr. Nicole Bedera, a sexual violence researcher at the University of Michigan, notes that this is the “oldest conservative trick in the book.”

“When conservatives are doing something liberals or progressives would never agree with, they label it as something that’s one of our core values—saying they’re concerned about coercion or gender-based violence. But in reality, nothing in their platform meets any of the demands of sexual violence experts or survivors.”

It’s easy to see through this, Bedera says, by asking if domestic violence victims are actually asking for any of this. They’re not. “The list of demands from survivor groups is very clear: abortion access and medication abortion are on that list,” she says.

Before Sara Ainsworth led If/When/How’s legal helpline, she spent decades helping domestic violence victims navigate the legal system. She tells AED that it was survivors—not anti-abortion activists—who coined the term “reproductive coercion.”

“It’s a term that arises from the actual lived experience of people who are surviving intimate partner violence, yet [anti-abortion activists are] co-opting this language, the same way they often co-opt social justice language,” Ainsworth says.

Consider, for instance, their feigned concerns with so-called “abortion trafficking,” or claims that abortion pills are harming the environment to justify more restrictions. “It’s about co-opting terminology about harm to then cause further harm,” she says.

Co-opting victimhood

Today, the anti-abortion movement is rallying around women who say they were coerced to have abortions—weaponizing their stories in courts. Louisiana, alongside a woman named Rosalie Markezich, is suing the FDA to ban telemedicine abortion, with Markezich claiming this enabled her abuser to force her to take abortion pills. Groups like 40 Days for Life are compiling interactive maps of women who have been ‘coerced’ with abortion medication.

But before this, the anti-abortion movement initially threw their support behind abusive men—openly or privately recruiting them to take legal action over their partners’ abortions. Ultimately, this failed to yield results, and, if anything, may have been counterproductive: In now two high-profile cases, the man’s history of abusing his partner came to light in court—exposing exactly what kind of person would sue over his partner’s abortion, and wield the legal system to punish or control their victim’s reproductive decisions.

It speaks volumes that the anti-abortion movement’s first instinct was to collude with abusers—only pivoting to pretend to care about some victims when this didn’t work.

Regardless of the anti-abortion movement’s PR stunts pretending to care about women, the fact remains: Forced pregnancy is a tool in abusers’ toolbox—and it’s a tool that abortion bans place directly in their hands.

The aforementioned National Domestic Violence Hotline survey found that since Dobbs, hundreds of respondents said their partners threatened to report them to law enforcement or threatened to take legal action if they had abortions. Ainsworth says most callers to If/When/How’s legal helpline, which supports people facing state investigation or punishment related to pregnancy, were reported to the state by abusive partners and are experiencing abuse.

This is reproductive coercion.

Infuriatingly, while anti-abortion activists co-opt terms like ‘reproductive coercion,’ too many victims struggle to advocate for themselves because they lack this vital language. In 2021, when California passed a law to add reproductive coercion to the state’s civil definition of domestic violence, one law professor who counsels victims told me many of her clients had never heard the term—and didn’t even recognize acts of reproductive coercion they’d experienced as abusive.

When all abortions are ‘coerced abortions’

Anti-abortion activists aren’t just trying to conflate medication abortion and coerced abortions—they’re trying to make the argument that nearly all abortions are coerced.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, for example, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America sent a memo to GOP candidates, legislators, and stakeholders, impossibly claiming that “nearly 70% of abortions coerced, unwanted or at odds with women’s own preferences.” And since Dobbs, lawmakers in multiple states have pushed to drastically expand the definition of abortion ‘coercion’—including the threat of “adverse financial consequences.” (For instance, a parent who refuses to help their child raise a baby could face legal consequences for ‘coercing’ their kid to have an abortion.)

The hypocrisy here is jarring. Anti-abortion activists often invoke ‘parental rights’ concerns as a pretext to target minors’ bodily autonomy, giving parents sweeping powers to block minors’ abortion access. But when parents help their children access abortion, conservatives classify this as ‘coercion.’

In one training video by the anti-abortion Justice Foundation, presenters recount successfully convincing police to stop a minor from having an abortion by claiming they were being coerced by their parents. Last year, the organization offered a similar training for preventing parents from ‘coercing’ their kids to have abortions at a conference for Heartbeat International—the country’s largest network of crisis pregnancy centers.

Why target abortion pills?

When Louisiana passed a law to recognize abortion pills as a ‘controlled substance’ in 2024, the author of the bill cited a family member’s experience being fed the pills without her knowledge or consent to justify the legislation. But drugging someone without their knowledge or consent is already a crime.

A wide range of drugs can be obtained via telehealth and be weaponized to abuse someone. Tellingly, conservatives are only going after telemedicine abortion pills instead of, say, date rape drugs.

What Republicans are really interested in is banning abortion—that’s all. And they’re zeroing in on telemedicine medication abortion specifically, rather than cracking down on medications most often weaponized by abusers. The true goal is to go after the people who help abortion seekers—like providers, abortion funds, or supportive partners and loved ones who might buy abortion pills on someone’s behalf.

Republicans will always go after the helpers, because they can’t face the optics of going after women.

The truth is that banning telemedicine abortion is more likely to trap victims who are desperately trying to escape their abusers. As Ainsworth says:

“They’re aiming to make it impossible to support someone seeking abortion, which isolates them further, which is one abusers’ primary tools to maintain control over them.”

To justify banning abortion altogether, Bedera notes that the right is hellbent on presenting a false choice: that women should “not be able to access abortion at all, or otherwise, they’ll be forced to have abortions when they don’t want them.” But there’s a third option:

“In reality, everyone should be able to make that choice for themselves. It can’t be an either-or of which patriarchal violence you prefer—the state or an abuser. We have to reject that notion. Bodily autonomy is the only option.”

What happens when victims can’t access abortion pills?

As of February 2026, Jerry Rodriguez’s victim was still pregnant—potentially tied for life to a man who has repeatedly strangled her. Stories like this are far too common. Sometimes they end fatally. That’s exactly the outcome that abortion providers like Rebecca Gomperts are trying to prevent.

Gomperts, who founded Aid Access, is also being sued by Jonathan Mitchell. As in his other case, Mitchell claims Gomperts and her group mailed pills into Texas that were used in a coerced abortion. She told AED:

“Anti-abortion groups are using people in tragic situations, vulnerable situations, and weaponizing them for their political aims, and that is disgusting.”

Gomperts stressed that abortion pills are a lifeline for victims because of the privacy this option can afford them: the medication can allow them to conceal an abortion from partners who might otherwise force them to remain pregnant.

In some states, including several where abortion is banned, a divorce can’t be finalized while someone is pregnant, sans exceptions for abuse.

The landmark Turnaway Study shows those who are denied abortions face significantly increased risk of long-term domestic violence. Abuse can begin for the first time or ongoing abuse is likely to escalate during pregnancy.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that the most common form of reproductive coercion isn’t forced abortion, but forced pregnancy. And, given that homicide, typically by an intimate partner, is the leading cause of death for pregnant people, abortion bans put victims in serious danger: a 2024 study revealed a direct link between laws that shut down clinics and risk of intimate partner violence-related homicide. In Texas, which enforces a sweeping ban, the Texas Council on Family Violence reports that from 2017 to 2023, at least 72 Texas women were killed by an intimate partner while they were pregnant or postpartum.

The aforementioned survey from the National Domestic Violence Hotline from 2024 found victims identify access to reproductive health clinics as lifesaving, because clinic workers are often the first to identify abuse and offer help. But abortion bans are shuttering these clinics en masse, cutting off a critical resource.

“The intersection with intimate partner violence and state violence is profound,” Ainsworth says. From her vantage point helping victims whose abusers threaten legal action, it’s devastating to tell women who live in banned states that their governments are more likely to criminalize them than their abusers.

“There’s nothing more abusive than trying to deny someone their bodily autonomy,” Ainsworth says. “That’s what abusers do—they don’t allow victims to say no to sex, they don’t let them have abortions, they don’t let them have control.”

Similar to any abuser, this is the anti-abortion movement’s ultimate goal: total control—insultingly, under the guise of protecting us. That’s why they’ve become obsessed with ‘coerced abortions,’ and why their claims can’t be taken in good faith.

Two years before meeting Rodriguez, his victim opened a “refuge” for women struggling with addiction. It’s no longer in operation, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, as she finds herself entangled in a legal war and on the brink of having a baby with Rodriguez. One California lawmaker called the case “a forced birth in open court,” adding: “It’s a war to control women and their bodies. [Mitchell is ] siding with abusers.”

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If you need legal help, contact Pregnancy Justice or If/When/How’s free Repro Helpline: 844-868-2812. You can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1.800.799.SAFE (7233)