Your Guide to the Last Four Years of Anti-Abortion Attacks

They want us to feel overwhelmed. Here's how we cut through the noise.

Four years after the end of Roe v. Wade, our ability to fight back comes down to whether or not we can keep our heads above water. Because right now, the anti-abortion movement’s most powerful weapon isn’t any one law or attack, but the weight of all of them all at once.

Their goal is to inundate us: if we can’t even keep up with the attacks, how can we possibly resist them?

Part of our mission at Abortion, Every Day is to cut through that noise and ensure that none of the anti-abortion movement’s strategies slip through the cracks or escape the outrage they deserve. And we’ve had a lot to write about.

We’re proud to be part of a movement that—despite the constant onslaught—has risen to the occasion. As you read ahead and reflect on some of the biggest issues of the last four years, remember this: in spite of all that anti-abortion money and political power, the ABORTION RATE REMAINS STEADY. That’s thanks to how powerful abortion rights activists are, and because a nation of Helpers are determined to make sure people can get the care they need.

That doesn’t mean these laws haven’t had an impact. If the last four years have shown us anything, it’s that abortion bans don’t reduce the number of abortions—they just increase suffering. That’s why we can’t commemorate Dobbs without acknowledging the MATERNAL MORTALITY CRISIS in banned states, and the women who’ve been killed by bans. While we’ll likely never know the true scale of death or every story, we do know a few of these women’s names: Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in Georgia, Josseli Barnica, Nevaeh Crain, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, and Porsha Ngumezi in Texas. Ciji Graham in North Carolina.

The post-Dobbs maternal mortality crisis isn’t a glitch that can be prevented with the right amount of performative legislative tinkering: it’s a devastating, baked-in feature of banning abortion. Study after study has revealed the deadliness of these laws—like one that estimates a 9.2% increase in pregnancy-associated deaths in banned states.

The wait-and-see approach demanded by anti-abortion laws is lethal: while state and federal legislation like EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency life-saving and stabilizing care—including abortions—doctors in banned states are more likely to wait for pregnant patients to reach the brink of death.

Patients who survive a life-threatening pregnancy are not left unscathed, either: the last four years have led to an increase in pregnancy complications and UNNECESSARY SUFFERING. We’ve heard from women who’ve gone septic, lost vital organs, and been left infertile. That suffering isn’t always limited to banned states, either: the PROLIFERATION OF CATHOLIC HOSPITALS has nearly killed women in states like Illinois and California, too.

That Republicans have fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to deny patients life-saving abortion care should tell you everything you need to know.

Just as important as tracking maternal mortality? Tracking the GOP’s efforts to conceal this suffering and death. In states like Idaho, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and Florida, Republicans have disbanded maternal mortality committees, stacked them with anti-abortion activists, or obstructed their ability to work—all while anti-abortion leaders blame doctors—or women themselves.

Thanks to abortion bans, we’re experiencing the structural collapse of women’s healthcare in real time. Since 2025, the federal DEFUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD and abortion providers has shuttered dozens of clinics across the country—including in health care deserts where these clinics were the sole health provider. As OBGYNs leave and medical students avoid banned states, we expect mortality and morbidity rates will only worsen.

Especially if the GOP and anti-abortion movement continue to push CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTERS as reasonable “replacements” for real reproductive healthcare clinics. These exorbitantly funded fake clinics don’t provide real care and regularly endanger women’s health and lives. They amount to anti-abortion surveillance facilities that collect (and share) women’s private data and collude with law enforcement—leaving marginalized and immigrant communities especially vulnerable, all while being increasingly immune from state regulation.

Pregnant women in the U.S. have always lived under a reproductive police state, but the end of Roe has further emboldened zealous prosecutors, cops, and lawmakers. Within two years after Dobbs, there were over 400 pregnancy-related arrests, including women arrested for “abuse of a corpse” for flushing or throwing away miscarriage remains. Others rely on misleading and charged language claiming fetuses were “born alive.”

Most of these cases follow the same pattern, and all advance FETAL PERSONHOOD—the anti-abortion claim that embryos, fetuses, and even fertilized eggs are constitutionally protected people whose rights supersede those of the pregnant person.

Pregnancy criminalization is driven by the anti-abortion movement’s growing SURVEILLANCE operation—from the weaponization of automatic license plate readers by law enforcement to track abortion patients, to GOP state government efforts to create databases of abortion patients or registries of pregnant people.

This increase in surveillance has been paired with an increasingly mainstream call to punish abortion patients, as once-fringe ABORTION ABOLITIONISTS and ‘EQUAL PROTECTION’ policies take over the anti-abortion movement. Bills that would punish women who end their pregnancies with the death penalty—once unthinkable—are now regularly introduced, and even advanced, in state legislatures across the country. The ‘abolitionists’ who draft these bills are infiltrating state Republican parties and platforms (as they did in Texas), or are being elected to office themselves. ‘Mainstream’ anti-abortion groups, too, are carefully moving towards endorsing punishment for patients.

Given the trend towards extremism, it’s no surprise that ANTI-ABORTION VIOLENCE is at an all-time high. Reported death threats against providers doubled from 2024 to 2025, clinic blockades surged, and reported arsons, harassment, threats, and other violence have spiked, too. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has effectively greenlit this violence—declining to enforce the FACE Act that protects clinics, pardoning violent activists, and characterizing the arrests of violent extremists as discrimination against Christians.

But this extremism will never be popular. Americans don’t even want conservatives’ ‘mainstream’ bans: 81% of voters oppose government interference in pregnancy and abortion. That’s why the anti-abortion movement is waging such aggressive ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY. Republicans have consistently obstructed abortion rights ballot measures.

And with abortion as a defining issue in nearly every election cycle since Dobbs, GOP candidates constantly misrepresent their anti-abortion positions to appear more “moderate.” Despite massive barriers created by Republicans, abortion rights ballot measures have succeeded in nearly every state they’ve appeared; pro-choice state Supreme Court justices have won tough races from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania; and, time and again, in red states and blue states, and up and down the ballot, nearly every election has become a referendum on reproductive rights.

Despite Republicans’ line about ‘leaving abortion up to the states,’ that’s the last thing we’ve seen in practice.

Abortion politics were never going to stay limited within state boundaries, and that’s especially true as ATTACKS ON ABORTION PILLS ramp up. Today, telemedicine abortion makes up nearly 30% of all abortions—and accounts for nearly all abortions in states with bans. Thanks to telehealth, the national abortion rate has remained relatively constant since Dobbs.

That’s why Louisiana is suing the FDA to ban telemedicine abortion—and to extradite two out-of-state providers for allegedly mailing medication abortion into the state. The goal is to have the Supreme Court eliminate the shield laws that protect blue state providers from criminal and civil penalties.

The anti-abortion movement has been clear what their ultimate objective is: a national ban via the COMSTOCK ACT, an 1873 zombie law that prohibits the interstate shipment of ‘obscene’ materials—like, say, abortion pills or abortion-related supplies.

One particularly egregious line of attack on pills? Equating medication abortion with ‘coercion’ and abuse—even though an abortion ban, itself, is the ultimate form of ‘coercion,’ and there is endless evidence that bans hold outsized harm on domestic violence victims. In reality, telemedicine access to abortion pills is a lifeline for abuse victims.

This brand of desperate propaganda has become par for the course from the anti-abortion movement. And their lies go beyond talking points. Since the end of Roe, conservatives have ramped up their claims EQUATING BIRTH CONTROL WITH ABORTION—which is now the official line from the Trump administration. The end goal is to push contraception out of reach, too: look at the Trump administration’s new Title X guidelines, which emphasize ‘natural family planning’, an anti-abortion dog whistle. And look, too, at the right’s cultural attacks on birth control via torrents of online disinformation via viral ‘tradwife’ influencers.

Speaking of extreme disinfo: the GOP and anti-abortion leaders are also equating abortion with pollution via their baseless, anti-science ‘ABORTION IN THE WATER’ narrative. They claim Americans are drinking each other’s abortions—unless people dispose of their miscarriage and pregnancy remains via ‘catch kits,’ which force women to bag up their blood as medical waste, rather than just flushing.

You’ll find ANTI-ABORTION CRUELTY in every one of their tactics: like telling women who end their doomed pregnancies that they’re “killing disabled children,” or calling it a “post-birth abortion” when devastated parents decline painful medical interventions for fatally-ill newborns.

Four years after Dobbs, no matter what happens next, the anti-abortion movement is already getting what it wants: chaos and confusion. That’s why ATTACKS ON SPEECH—from legislation to censor pro-choice websites and advertising, to cancellations of pro-choice speakers—are so central to their movement. They want us all to have as little information as possible as we navigate an endlessly expanding minefield of threats and barriers to access care.

The truth is, they’re threatened by the power, resilience, and reach of our movement, and our ability to pool resources and information. They hope their threats will have a chilling effect. They’re trying to isolate us, and especially young people.

Abortion, Every Day is turning *four* this month, and we’re not slowing down. Our mission remains more vital than ever: we’ll continue to call out anti-abortion attacks, highlight the people and organizations making a difference, and bring you the national and local abortion news mainstream media ignores.

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Young people—especially young women—hate abortion bans. That’s exactly why the anti-abortion movement has its sights set on TARGETING YOUNG WOMEN, whether through cultural propaganda like the PINK PILL PIPELINE, or legislation like ‘BABY OLIVIA’ bills to insert anti-abortion lies in sex ed classes.

The goal is to get young women to see the loss of our rights and freedoms as a good thing. Conservatives even published a roadmap for how to make it happen: following up its hit Project 2025 for the Trump administration, the far-right Heritage Foundation published a 250-year plan, which heavily focuses on indoctrinating young women.

As conservatives attack young women, they weaponize faux panics over ‘parental rights’ to target youth abortion access and abortion access broadly. But when parents choose to help their kids access abortion, they’re punished, as anti-abortion politicians increasingly go after helpers. Look at our recent reporting on a mother who was separated from her teen daughter by Child Protective Services—for trying to help her daughter travel out-of-state for abortion care, which is legal.

In Jessica’s 2024 book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, she makes the case for how anti-abortion politicians are trying “to get away with attacking us under the cover of national overwhelm.”

It’s natural to be overwhelmed—but the stakes are too high to turn a blind eye.

However trite it may seem, staying informed, and keeping your community informed—are vital forms of resistance and activism against a dominant political movement throwing everything it can at the wall just to see what effectively dismantles our rights.

Four years after Dobbs, we’re as committed to doing our part—that is, helping you stay informed—as ever, and we hope you are, too.