Exotic Dancer Says Texas Abortion Ban Author Paid for Abortions

7.25.25

Click to skip ahead: Meet the Creeps has some delightful news out of Texas. Weird Science reports on the anti-abortion lawsuit in Missouri—and how it’s a sign of attacks to come. In the States has news out of Mississippi, Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, and more. Care Denied shares the story of a Georgia woman denied an abortion even after her fetus died. Attacks on Birth Control takes a look at the latest Trump administration attempt to make us Stepford tradwives. Extremism Watch gives you the tea on trouble in anti-abortion paradise. And Meet AED reminds you that Kylie and Jessica will be speaking in Brooklyn next Tuesday night!

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Meet the Creeps

We had a rough news day, so let’s start with something downright delightful: Texas Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, lead author of the state’s ban, is being accused of paying for multiple abortions by an exotic dancer.

Every word of that sentence is a gift.

Dancer Alex Grace says that Capriglione has “funded” several abortions. The Barbed Wire reports that Grace alleges having a long-term affair with the Republican lawmaker, and that his hypocrisy drove her to come forward:

“If you are using abortions for your personal gain, if you are using women for your personal gain, why announce to the world that this isn’t who you are?”

The Republican representative admitted today to having an affair, but says, “I have never, nor would I ever, pay for an abortion.”

If you say so! ¯\(ツ)/¯

Weird Science

Last month, Abortion, Every Day warned that a new wave of junk science from some of the anti-abortion movement’s most extreme ‘researchers’ signaled that something big was coming. Now we know what it is.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, claiming the organization lied about the safety of abortion pills—and citing the very studies we’ve been raising the alarm about.

Bailey’s suit targets Planned Parenthood Federation of America, not its Missouri affiliate, and is designed to be much more than a single conservative thorn in the organization’s side.

The suit is a model for other attorneys general eager to make a national name for themselves: Bailey is seeking millions in penalties and up to $1,000 in damages for every Missouri woman that Planned Parenthood prescribed abortion pills to over the last five years. And we’re not just talking about women who took the pills in the state, but any Missouri woman who took abortion medication anywhere!

What’s more, Bailey is seeking a court order to force Planned Parenthood to stop making “false statements misrepresenting the abortion pill.” Essentially that means he wants to enjoin the national organization from advertising or promoting abortion medication at all. Because according to Bailey, anything Planned Parenthood says about the safety of abortion pills is “false.”

Now, the good news is that the Republican AG is relying on absolute bullshit, nonsense science. (If you can even call it that.) Bailey cites, for example, the widely debunked study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC)—a group that straight up admitted their research was designed to “eliminate” mifepristone.

The EPPC says that 10% of women who take abortion medication “suffer serious adverse events.” But that claim falls apart at even the slightest scrutiny. For example, out of the 94,605 patients they say were seriously harmed by abortion pills, 40,960 simply visited an emergency room. Not treated at the emergency room, but visited.

Bailey repeats the emergency room visit lie throughout his lawsuit, along with other junk science pulled from recent studies published by the Charlotte Lozier Institute. These are the same studies we flagged a few weeks ago—like the one bylined by nine different anti-abortion activists who insist emergency rooms are regularly miscoding abortions as miscarriages.

Here’s the thing: This suit comes at the same time that Republicans have launched a multi-pronged attack on abortion medication. They are desperate to stop the pills that allow for women to end their pregnancies in spite of state bans. (Right now, one in four American abortions are medication abortions provided via telehealth.)

And the anti-abortion movement has a perfect ally in Bailey, who has launched unrelenting attacks on abortion rights over the last few years.

We’ll have more on this suit and what it means more broadly next week, but please know that we can expect to see a lot more of this junk science in the coming months. So the sooner we spread the word on what absolute horseshit it is, the better.

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We shared an update earlier today on the woman arrested for her miscarriage in South Carolina. Find out how you can help support her legal defense:

South Carolina Miscarriage Patient Turned in to Child Protective Services

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In the States

After two years under a 12-week abortion ban, the fallout in North Carolina has been tragic and predictable: Doctors and advocates say that patients with medical emergencies are being denied timely, urgently-needed abortion care as chaos plagues the state’s health system.

Data from the state health department backs that up: since 2022, the rate of pregnant patients facing serious, life-threatening complications during their deliveries has surged by 23%.

Providers tell North Carolina Health News that they’ve watched patients hemorrhaging and on the brink of serious medical emergencies while hospitals consult legal departments, or even transfer patients out-of-state. From maternal fetal medicine specialist Maria Small:

“Do I think there’s going to be a change with an increase [in fatalities]? I don’t want to say it, but I do think there will be. Pray I am wrong, but this is my fear.”

Let’s turn to Florida. Ever since Abortion, Every Day raised alarms about the extreme anti-abortion record of Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly, things are getting messy. Politico reports that some Dem leaders in the state are calling for reproductive rights advocates to hold their questions and criticisms as Jolly emerges as the frontrunner.

“This is not the way I would like to see us go—to start attacking someone I think would be a very strong candidate,” said Broward County Commissioner Nan Rich.

Criticisms of Jolly reached a fever pitch after Anna Hochkammer, executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, wrote an op-ed about his candidacy in the Miami Herald. But Democrats like former Pinecrest Mayor Cindy Lerner—who has endorsed Jolly—said, “we are not naïve or novices.”

“We are very staunch reproductive rights advocates who have been fighting for decades to provide access. Is he pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes except Anna? It doesn’t ring true.”

AED will have more in the coming days, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable that candidates should face questions about their records! Especially on abortion, and especially in a state where Democratic nominee should be willing to fight like hell to repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban.

More state funding is being funneled to crisis pregnancy centers across the country—so let’s check in with what that looks like in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Georgia.

In Mississippi, it’s the so called MAMA (Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance) program. (Their website’s language is exhausting—lots of “you can do this, mama!” bullshit.) Since the program was established in 2023, the state tells anti-abortion news outlets it’s “served 23,000 women.” MAMA also funds and promotes so-called ‘baby boxes’, which are advertised as a way for women to drop off their newborns if they can’t safely care for them.

The truth? The boxes are rarely used, and primarily serve to funnel money to anti-abortion groups. What’s more, parents who leave infants in 'baby boxes' most often cannot regain custody of their child. Some—who tried to do the safe thing while in the middle of a crisis moment—have spent years trying to get their babies back.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s “Choosing Childbirth” program sent $18 million to Oklahoma Life Foundation’s network of CPCs—that’s one-third of the program’s entire 2024 budget!

If OKLF sounds familiar, it might be because the organization is funding Her First Women’s Health—the first-ever telehealth crisis pregnancy center that we flagged a few weeks ago. (If you didn’t read that issue of the newsletter, the totally bananas videos from this group are worth a watch.)

And in Georgia, Gwinnett County commissioners are trying to allocate approximately half a million in public funding to the anti-abortion Georgia Wellness Group. About $400,000 of these funds would support a “maternity home” for “pregnant women in crisis” and $50,000 would support “pediatric and behavioral and mental health care,” Axios reports.

So-called ‘maternity homes’ are often sites of grave abuse and exploitation—like requiring women to turn over their food stamps, and mandating their phones be tracked. All of this diverts from funding that could cover actual health care and resources for pregnant people and new parents.

And as Kylie reported this week, CPCs are not only sites of extreme disinformation and manipulation—but of state surveillance. These groups are collecting massive amounts of data that they then go on to share with anti-abortion state governments.

Quick hits:

• Jennifer Weiss-Wolf at The Contrarian writes about the ‘unwed’ woman denied prenatal care in Tennessee;

• Planned Parenthood is suing to end Nevada’s forced parental notification law;

• And The Guardian on the Texas lawsuit targeting a California abortion provider. (For our coverage, click here.)

Care Denied

Yet another post-Roe horror story, this time out of Georgia. WABE shares the story of Kaycee Maruscsak, who found out during a routine scan that her fetus no longer had cardiac activity. Instead of providing her with urgently needed, emergency abortion care, she says the hospital sent her home with “a list of abortion clinics” elsewhere.

The mother of three went to an emergency room and asked, “What do I do? What do I if I start dying?’”

“They were like, ‘Well, if you start bleeding really heavy and passing clots, then you need to come immediately back.’ So, I have to be on a deathbed to try to get help? It’s dehumanizing. I spent seven hours there in pain and grief and in shock, only to be discharged with no treatment, no resolution, and once again, no care.”

Eventually Maruscsak learned she suffered from placenta previa, a life-threatening condition where the placenta partially or completely blocks the opening to the uterus.

“I could’ve lost my life, and yet still nobody helped,” she said. “I was forced to walk around for more than a week carrying Sawyer, who was no longer alive.”

There’s a reason that women keep using terms like ‘walking coffin’ and ‘walking tomb.’

Incredibly, Georgia Sen. Ed Setzler, who sponsored the state ban, marked its three-year anniversary by calling the law, an “appropriate balance.” It doesn’t get any crueler or more callous than that.

To support abortion storytellers, check out We Testify and Abortion in America.

Attacks on Birth Control

I wrote a bit this week about the Trump administration’s plan to make us all Stepford tradwives—from their policies to ‘persuade’ women to have more babies, to rerouting Title X funding to create an ‘infertility treatment center’.

A huge part of that plan is about cultural buy-in; that’s why conservatives have spent the last few years spreading misinformation on birth control. If they’re going to force more women in motherhood, Republicans need American women—young women, especially—to believe that hormonal contraception is bad for them.

PBS NewsHour dug in to some of that insidious cultural campaign this week:

Extremism Watch

Well this is interesting: The maniacs who want abortion patients to get life in prison or the death penalty are calling out mainstream anti-choice organizations for not getting on board—publicly, at least. They claim the nation’s most powerful anti-abortion leaders actually do want to see women jailed, but aren’t willing to say as much out loud.

In a scathing op-ed, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion (FAA) slammed Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—pointing out that she keeps alluding to punishing women, but refuses to actually do anything about it.

It would be a fun bit of tea if they weren’t talking about, you know, killing women.

Some context: More and more, Republicans are introducing ‘equal protection’ legislation—bills that would punish abortion patients as murderers. In some places that could mean the death penalty. FAA is the group behind that push: they draft the bills, lobby for them, and identify legislators who might be as crazy as they are. They’re even getting fellow so-called abortion ‘abolitionists’ elected to office.

Now, the mainstream anti-abortion movement and most Republican legislators know that jailing women for abortion is wildly unpopular, so they’ve distanced themselves from FAA. But they do like punishing women! So they’ve focused on roundabout ways of scratching that itch—like arresting women for improper disposal fetal remains.

But that barely-there mask is beginning to slip: the country’s most powerful anti-abortion organizations are dropping breadcrumbs about wanting to jail women. Their most obvious tell? Talking about the Fourteenth Amendment. Fetal personhood proponents and abortion ‘abolitionists’ claim that Americans’ constitutional right to “equal protection” under the law also applies to fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs. (That’s why their bills are called ‘equal protection’ legislation.)

For a while, Abortion, Every Day has noticed that leaders like Dannenfelser are increasingly name dropping the Fourteenth Amendment and ‘equal protection’. But it appears we’re not the only ones who’ve noticed!

In the op-ed, FAA’s communications director slammed Dannenfelser for her wink-wink-nudge-nudge rhetoric—writing that her group “professes to believe that human life starts at conception and that preborn babies should receive protection of the laws,” but that their “legislative advocacy efforts in recent years have subverted that stance.”

We’d do well to watch this rift, and to call out Dannenfelser and her ilk for trying to slyly support sending women to jail when they think no one is listening.

Something else to keep an eye on in that op-ed? FAA drops one of our anti-abortion glossary words: ‘loophole.’ As in, abortion patients not getting the electric chair is an abortion ban ‘loophole’. (Do you hate this timeline as much as I do?)

For more on Republicans’ plan to punish abortion patients, click here.

Meet AED

Live in New York? Kylie and Jessica will be at the Lofty Pigeon in Brooklyn next Tuesday, talking about Kylie’s new book, Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans. Get all the details and RSVP here.