Anti-Abortion Leaders' Coup Against FDA Chief

5.12.26

Click to skip ahead: Anti-Abortion Leaders Get FDA Chief Fired; How Real is the Conflict Between Trump and Anti-Abortion Groups?; Dr. Oz Says One in Three Americans Are “Under-Babied”; Reminder: Republicans Are Going After Miscarriage Management; In the States: North Carolina, Missouri, Florida; Extremism Rising: Activist Wants to ‘Unalive’ Pro-Choice Volunteers; Ballot Box: Anti-Abortion Deceit in Oregon, Kansas

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Anti-Abortion Leaders Get FDA Chief Fired

After months of backlash from anti-abortion leaders, FDA chief Marty Makary resigned today, signaling that influential ‘pro-life’ groups are firmly in the driver’s seat of this administration.

The ‘resignation’ is clearly a firing: reports began to emerge that Donald Trump planned to oust the FDA commissioner on Friday—just hours after meeting with anti-abortion leaders like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s Marjorie Dannenfelser. As Abortion, Every Day reported yesterday, the groups are furious that Makary didn’t do more to ban telemedicine medication abortion.

Key context: Makary is hardly some pro-choice hero. If anything, he helped kick off an unsophisticated PR campaign to pave the way for a ban on medication abortion.

Last year, Makary declared that if a study were to come out calling mifepristone’s safety into question, the FDA would have to act. Days later, the Christian nationalist think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) released their junk ‘study’ framing abortion pills as dangerous. (Which, naturally, brought up some questions about coordination between anti-abortion activists and the FDA.)

Then came the announcement that the FDA would independently evaluate the safety of mifepristone—a move some saw as a set-up to eventually restrict the medication, and others took as the Trump administration throwing the anti-abortion movement a bone.

Either way, the FDA wasn’t moving quickly enough for anti-abortion activists.

Citing the fact that Makary still had his job, Dannenfelser went so far as to tell the Wall Street Journal recently, “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem.”

In other words, publicly insulting Trump might just be a tactic for anti-abortion activists to get what they want—all while Trump can operate under the guise of being a reasonable moderate who simply had his arm twisted.

Where do we go from here? A Supreme Court ruling on telemedicine access to mifepristone is imminent. From there, we’ll see how Trump’s new FDA leader responds. But let’s be clear about what Makary’s ousting signals: the anti-abortion movement and the Trump administration are in this together—and they have their sights on medication abortion.

How Real is the Conflict Between Trump and Anti-Abortion Groups?

Anti-abortion activists have been very publicly pissed at Trump lately—or, at least, they’re performing that they are. It’s becoming more difficult to know when there’s actual conflict between the president and anti-abortion leaders, and when they’re just playing it up for the benefit of overwhelmingly pro-choice voters.

After all, we know how much coordination there is between Trump’s camp and anti-abortion leaders. In 2024, Jessica reported on how groups like SBA directly fed Trump his unhinged lines equating abortion with ‘executing babies’ and ‘breaking babies’ necks.’ And we all saw how the anti-abortion movement feigned upset with the GOP’s 2024 platform on abortion—knowing that it was actually a lot more radical than they let on.

There’s an obvious pattern here: when anti-abortion leaders publicly play up their supposed ‘rift’ with the administration, the administration rushes to appease them—whether with the firing of Makary, or Title X guidelines that barely mention birth control, or embracing politicized ‘studies’ of mifepristone.

And while there’s nothing unusual about political groups exerting pressure in the media to get what they want, we can’t help but wonder how much of this current conflict is performative.

On top of firing Makary on Tuesday, on Monday, Trump appeared to signal support for Congressional Republicans who are pushing for a renewal of the ‘defund’ provision of the federal budget bill. Asked about the topic, Trump said his administration has “been very good for the people who want it”—aka people like Dannenfelser—though he admitted that things have been “very thorny” between them at some points. (Defunding Planned Parenthood has been a source of conflict this time around, even among some Republicans.)

It’s not even a little subtle what anti-abortion groups will demand of Trump, next: Students for Life just delivered a petition calling for the Justice Department to ban telemedicine abortion via the Comstock Act.

Dr. Oz Says One in Three Americans Are “Under-Babied”

Dr. Oz rolled out some of the creepiest pro-natalist jargon yet yesterday—complaining that “one in three Americans are under-babied.” Can we just go back to JD Vance calling us “childless cat ladies”?

Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Dr. Oz made the comments during a Monday event announcing the dystopian MOMS.gov. He defined “under-babied” as “you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.”

Oz’s comments come at a time when conservatives have become obsessed with the fertility rate. It’s all, of course, to justify their forced birth policies—and increasingly, to even advocate for more teen pregnancy. (Just last month, Fox News and conservative pundit Katie Miller complained about the declining teen birth rate.)

In the Oval Office, Oz railed against our nation’s supposed fertility crisis, and only nominally acknowledged rising maternal mortality and care deserts—crises that have been exacerbated by Republican abortion bans. Earlier this year, Oz callously pitched sending around robots to maternal care deserts—an insulting idea widely panned by the medical community. Between his robot pitch and use of bizarre terms like “under-babied,” you can tell this is someone who totally sees pregnant people as human beings.

Reminder: Republicans Are Going After Miscarriage Management

Republicans are trying to ban medication abortion. Mifepristone is at the Supreme Court right now. That’s terrifying enough. But stories like that of Mississippi state Sen. Kamesha Mumford add a new layer of awful to all of this.

Mumford tells Mississippi Today that as she struggled with her fertility in 2009 and 2010, the medication misoprostol—one of two pills typically taken in a medication abortion—helped her safely expel remaining fetal tissue during her pregnancy loss. Removal of fetal tissue can be essential to preserving one’s future fertility. Thanks to misoprostol, Mumford was able to get pregnant again and have her daughter in 2017.

Mumford shared her story because Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves just signed a bill threatening anyone who so much as intends to distribute misoprostol with 10 years in prison, effective July 1. One GOP legislator, Joey Fillingane, told Mississippi Today the bill is “a win for law enforcement and for the pro-life community”—even as misoprostol was a crucial factor in Mumford’s birth story.

“Those are drugs that I’ve taken—not to have an abortion, but to have a baby,” Mumford said, warning that because of legislation like this, women like her could risk losing their fertility altogether.

Louisiana was the first state to make abortion pills a controlled substance back in 2024. The move devastated hospitals, as doctors warned that time-sensitive access to misoprostol is essential to stop postpartum hemorrhage—one of the leading causes of death for pregnant patients—and that policies like this endanger women’s lives.

In the States: North Carolina, Missouri, Florida

A new bill in North Carolina would require crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) getting state funding to disclose how and where those taxpayer dollars are being spent. About 100 CPCs receive government funding in North Carolina, and CPCs brought in over $2.5 billion in revenue across the country in 2025.

HB 1120, the Financial Effectiveness and Transparency Act, comes at a moment when CPCs are increasingly claiming that any sort of state regulation amounts to discrimination or infringements on free speech. From the North Carolina Newsline:

“[Bill sponsor Rep. Julie] Von Haefen stressed that H1120 would not restrict what the centers ‘say or believe,’ nor would it prohibit them from receiving state funding across the board.

Instead, it would bar the state from funding any anti-abortion pregnancy center that fails to meet new disclosure requirements, including full revenue and expense budgets, staff directories, client totals and services provided.”

Von Haefen also aptly notes that CPCs “doing valuable work have nothing to fear from this bill and everything to gain.” Of course, they’re not: for all the flowery language they use and (highly conditional) resources they claim to offer, CPCs exist with the one and only purpose of preventing abortion. And we know that they use state funding to deceive and spy on pregnant people.

Right now, Republicans across the country are introducing bills like the CARE Act to shield CPCs from any and all accountability. And just last month, the Supreme Court sided with anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers in a frustrating ruling against New Jersey’s investigation into one CPC network’s financial practices.

What states really need is more legislation like HB 1120.

An upsetting update about Missouri’s cruel ‘Born Alive’ bill: it just passed out of a state House committee and will receive a full House vote that could send it to Gov. Mike Kehoe’s desk before the session ends on Friday. We’ve written at length about the horrors of bills like this, but here’s what you need to know: ‘Born Alive’ legislation forces doctors to perform futile and painful medical procedures on fatally ill newborns—traumatizing and denying parents the peace of saying goodbye to their children on their own terms.

As Democratic state Rep. Pattie Mansur put it:

“One thing I’ve learned here in two years is that there are some very unusual and tragic situations that can happen in the course of a pregnancy. And I don’t think we fully know all of those nor do I think we should claim the right to know them.”

Yet, time and again, cruelty and punishment are the point of anti-abortion legislation. Look at Florida, where, two years after the state’s six-week ban took effect, OBGYNs warn that prenatal care has become sharply less accessible. NPR affiliate WUSF previously reported a 25% surge in Florida mothers receiving delayed or no prenatal care at all from 2021 to 2024—the year the ban took effect. Florida OBGYN Dr. Elkin explained why even delayed prenatal care is so dangerous:

“What most people don’t understand is that because of that delay of care, (it) created issue(s) for patients that are getting sicker for simply trying to get pregnancy care and also miscarriages.”

Not for nothing, but since Dobbs, CPCs and anti-abortion groups have increasingly tried to malign prenatal care and prenatal testing altogether. Why? Because sometimes prenatal screenings show a pregnancy is nonviable or even dangerous, leading patients to need abortion care. Jessica wrote at length about the anti-abortion war on prenatal care in 2024:

The GOP's Next Target? Prenatal Tests

Extremism Rising: Activist Wants to ‘Unalive’ Pro-Choice Volunteers

Next week, a California anti-abortion activist associated with the heinously named extremist group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust will go on trial. While protesting a clinic in September, Anastasia Rogers posted a video featuring a clinic volunteer with the text “Unalive them with kindness” and then just “Unalive them.” (“Unalive” is internet slang for “kill,” meant to circumvent online censorship.)

Rogers, who has a history of harassing clinics, was arrested in December at the same clinic for violating a protective order requiring her to stay 150 feet away. She faces charges under California’s Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.

San Francisco Public Press has harrowing details of what Rogers’ harassment of clinic personnel and patients entailed. One clinic volunteer says Rogers followed a patient so closely, yelling at her to not “kill [her] baby,” that the patient “was crying big tears and trembling.” The outlet reports that one of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust’s chief tactics is nonconsensually videotaping and assailing clinic personnel to dox and intimidate them.

Anti-abortion violence is on the rise in this country. Last fall, there was a shooting outside a South Carolina Planned Parenthood. In the spring, a Montana man plotted to assassinate a provider. In other words, it’s no small thing for an activist to post a stunt video with inflammatory text—not in a country with a long history of assassinations against abortion providers, and persistent threats and harassment.

It’s terrifying to consider what might happen if California didn’t have this law. While there’s a federal FACE Act, just days after Trump took office, his DOJ announced the agency would no longer enforce the law. That happened the same week that the president pardoned two dozen criminal anti-abortion protesters, including some who used physical violence.

Ballot Box: Anti-Abortion Deceit in Oregon, Kansas

We’re fully in the swing of midterms, and Oregon’s primary elections are just one week from today—May 19. The Statesman Journal talked to all four Republican gubernatorial candidates on where they stand on abortion—and while their god-awful positions are nearly identical, their language is worth digging into. Nearly every word speaks to just how unpopular Republicans know their bans are. (And every answer echoed the messaging AED has been warning about for years.)

Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell, for instance, shared her story of having an abortion when she was a homeless teen. Bethell, endorsed by Oregon Right to Life, gifted us with an astonishing, doublespeak, word salad:

“As governor, I will do everything I can to make sure that I can bring on resources statewide that are balanced and allow women access to make a choice other than an abortion.”

Her use of the pro-choice buzzwords “access” and “choice” is laughable—Republicans want to give us “access” and “choice” to do the thing they’re forcing us to do: give birth. It’s truly dystopian, but it’s also a reminder: they know their position is unpopular, so all they have left is to misrepresent it.

Another candidate, state Rep. Ed Diehl, said, “Oregonians, by and large, expect access to abortion within limits.” I’ll save you the time: “limit” means “ban.”

Another candidate, businessman and former Portland Trail Blazer Chris Dudley, has flip-flopped on whether he’s pro-choice or ‘pro-life’. He landed on ‘pro-life,’ but gave reporters the tried-and-true, “I think our laws on abortion are codified. I’m not running to change anything on abortion.”

We’ve warned about this tactic since last fall: at a time when states need proactive, pro-abortion policies, and when bans and extreme anti-abortion laws are getting sneakier and subtler, GOP candidates are posing as moderates by claiming they’ll simply ‘respect the laws.’ Of course, in that same interview, Dudley said he’s against “late-term abortion and tax-payer funded abortion”—in other words, he supports a ban.

All of these answers are a primer in the spin you can expect from anti-abortion politicians eager to hide their support for bans throughout this year’s midterms.

Kansas also has an important election coming up in August: a new ballot measure would end the merit-based system for appointing state Supreme Court justices and make these elected positions instead.

The stakes for abortion are direct. In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court established a right to abortion in the state Constitution—and that court is now in conservatives’ crosshairs. GOP Senate President Ty Masterson has said flipping the court through elections could help overturn that ruling. Depending on the year, Supreme Court elections can also deflate overall voter turnout, which would favor the amendment’s supporters.

The Kansas Reflector spoke to Kansas Abortion Fund’s Sandy Brown on her hope that voters will repeat what happened in 2022, when they defeated a similarly insidious ballot measure to eliminate the state’s right to abortion, opening the door for a ban:

“People need to stand up like they did before in 2022 and just ram it down their throats. Put up your yard signs, make a donation, get online. … I know that Kansans will rise to the occasion, and they will understand that this is about overturning abortion protections.”

Hopeful as Brown is, she also laid out the stakes: “Big money will be thrown in. And we all know what that’s going to look like. It’s going to get ugly.”