North Carolina Proposes Total Abortion Ban

4.7.25

Click to skip ahead: Hands Off has a few of my favorite protest signs from this weekend. The 12-Week Lie looks at the new total abortion ban proposed in North Carolina—two years after they promised they’d stop at 12 weeks. Truth Wars warns about social media ‘fact checking.’ All Eyes on Extremism with news on a new ‘equal protection’ bill in Alabama. In the States, news from Texas, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Michigan, Colorado, and more. In the Nation reports that the new solicitor general of the United States believes that some kinds of contraception are actually ‘abortifacients.’ Coming Soon has a glimpse of what’s in tomorrow’s newsletter.

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Hands Off

Before we delve into today’s news, just a quick gallery of some of my favorite signs from the Hands Off protests across the country:

The 12-Week Lie

Nearly two years ago, North Carolina passed its 12-week abortion ban—with Republicans calling it “common sense, reasonable” legislation that voters should see as a “compromise.” Never mind that the law forced women to carry doomed pregnancies to term, or required suicidal patients to stay pregnant against their will. Republicans had their talking point.

At the time, I warned they would never stop at 12 weeks—that banning abortion after the first trimester was just their first step. (I even wrote a column called “The 12-Week Lie.”)

And now here we are: Republican Representative Keith Kidwell has introduced HB 804, a total abortion ban that allows care only if a woman would die without it. Under Kidwell’s bill, performing an abortion would be a felony punishable by life in prison.

So the question is: Will Republican legislators stick to the 12-week promise they made to their constituents—or is punishing women even further just too tempting to pass up?

While we’re waiting to find out, a few things about HB 804: It only allows for miscarriage treatment if the fetus has expired; it defines personhood as beginning at fertilization; and it requires doctors to perform abortions “in a manner that…provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive.” That’s language we’ve seen before—it’s meant to force doctors to perform c-sections and induce labor rather than provide a standard abortion procedure.

Like the 12-week ban/lie that came before it, HB 804 also claims to allow life-saving care—but with a deliberate and telling exception: suicide. The bill’s language makes it clear that the risk of death doesn’t count if it comes from “a claim or diagnosis that the female would engage in conduct that may result in the female's death.”

In other words: Even if your doctor determines that you're at risk of killing yourself, the law would still force you to stay pregnant against your will. I’ve always found these caveats to be among the most revealing: Republicans know their bans will make women want to kill themselves—and they’ve written into law that they don’t care.

I’ll keep you updated as HB 804 moves forward.

Truth Wars

When I woke up this morning, I found that one of my tweets—about the young woman arrested for her miscarriage in Georgia—had been hit with a ‘community note.’ For those of you lucky enough to have escaped Twitter (sorry, X), community notes are supposed to be crowdsourced fact-checks. In reality, they’re just another way for the conservative mob to decide what counts as truth—and to train the platform’s algorithm to reflect their worldview. What could go wrong?!

In this case, the “context” added to my tweet claimed the Georgia woman was charged with disposing of her “dead baby,” and reminded readers that “having a miscarriage is not a criminal offense in Georgia.”

This terrifies me. We are watching, in real time, as the right wing rewrites reality—replacing facts with whatever narrative suits them. Conservatives have always ignored the truth when it comes to abortion, but now they get to present their bullshit as if it’s objective fact in one of the country’s most visible online spaces.

The last time I got a community note, it was for sharing images of what early pregnancy/abortion actually look like. Determined to convince the public that an 8-week embryo resembles one of those plastic baby dolls they hand out outside clinics, anti-abortion activists claimed the images were fake or doctored. The community note echoed that lie.

And this isn’t just an X problem. Right around the time Trump took office, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was ditching its partnership with fact-checking organizations that were supposed to keep the platform free from disinformation. Just as absurd: he claimed the move was about protecting free speech and fighting censorship—even as information about abortion continues to be suppressed.

More and more, I’m worried we’re losing the internet as a tool for truth—and that speaking honestly about abortion online is only going to get harder. (Keep an eye out for a separate email from me about this soon.)

All Eyes On Extremism

Alabama has become the 12th state to introduce legislation that would punish abortion patients as murderers.

Introduced by Rep. Ernie Yarbrough, Alabama’s “Prenatal Equal Protection Act” (aka House Bill 518) would mandate that abortions be prosecuted as homicides, and eliminate a provision in state law that protects patients from being charged with murder.

The bill also says that while women could use “duress” as a defense, they would not be able to do so if they “intentionally or recklessly placed himself or herself in a situation in which it was probable that he or she would be subjected to duress.”

Want to know what that means? Consider Marshae Jones: She’s the Alabama woman who was charged with murder after she lost her pregnancy after being shot in the stomach. The state argued that she put herself in a bad situation which resulted in her pregnancy loss. (Seriously.) Or think about a woman who was beat up by her husband; this legislation would allow the state to charge her with murder if she miscarries. Because why didn’t she leave?

Unfortunately, the possibilities are endless with this kind of bill. While no ‘equal protection’ bill has passed yet, these radical calls to punish women are gaining steam—along with sponsors and support. Find out more here.

In the States

More evidence this week that the abortion rights fight is increasingly happening at the local level: Less than 24 hours after the San Antonio City Council voted to allocate $100,000 towards helping people travel out of the state to get abortions, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit against the city.

As Eleanor Klibanoff at the Texas Tribune points out, the suit wasn’t a surprise; Paxton did the same thing when Austin created an abortion fund. In his current suit, the Republican AG calls the San Antonio fund “an illegal abortion procurement scheme,” and asks the court for a temporary injunction.

San Antonio councilwoman and mayoral candidate Melissa Cabello Havrda said, “I’ve got one job up here, and it’s to protect the people I represent.”

Since Roe was overturned, we’ve seen a handful of progressive cities try to soften the blow of their states’ bans. The anti-abortion movement has also targeted towns and counties—proposing and passing local ordinances that make it more difficult for women to leave their states for care. For a glimpse at what that looked like for the activists in one Texas town, read this guest post from the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance:

How to Stop An ‘Abortion Trafficking’ Ordinance

Meanwhile, a Pennsylvania Democrat is urging her fellow legislators to enshrine the federal FACE Act, which protects abortion clinics from violence and harassment, into state law. Rep. Lindsay Powell’s bill comes in the wake of the Trump Justice department announcing they won’t pursue FACE Act cases—essentially giving anti-abortion activists a green light to harass and hurt patients, clinic staff, and doctors. From Powell:

“My deepest fear is if the federal government fails us and we don’t have a failsafe in Pennsylvania, we could be repeating the dangerous and dark history we've seen before the FACE Act existed.”

Read more about how the Trump administration has declared open season on clinics here.

The Kansas Reflector got their hands on more than 1,500 public comments submitted to the Republican-led state Senate Committee on Government Efficiency. About 300 of those—sent in during February and March—were about abortion:

“Most begged legislators to leave the issue alone, as voters made their opinions clear in the August 2022 primary, during which a constitutional amendment to eliminate abortion rights failed by a 59-41 margin.”

Consider it just another reminder that Republicans don’t give a shit about what voters want.

Speaking of ignoring the will of voters: In the wake of Trump’s Title X cuts, Planned Parenthood of Michigan has announced that they’re permanently shuttering three clinics.

The healthcare centers in Jackson, Petoskey, and Marquette will shut down on April 30, with the latest patient appointments happening on April 25th. The group is also cutting 10% of their staff. I’m so sorry for the people in Michigan—especially for the communities served by these three clinics. Donate to Planned Parenthood of Michigan here.

In better news, Colorado continues to lead the way in abortion rights: A bill is advancing through the legislature that will repeal the state’s prohibition on public funds for abortion. Remember, voters already approved a constitutional amendment in November to allow public funding—this bill is how lawmakers will put that amendment into action.

Quick hits:

• Wyoming’s new abortion law is forcing patients to travel hundreds of miles out of state;

• MSNBC on the ruling prohibiting Alabama from prosecuting abortion funds that help patients get out-of-state care;

• And the Arkansas Times has its latest installment of their series on what went wrong with the Arkansas abortion rights ballot measure.

In the Nation

The country’s new solicitor general—a role sometimes referred to as the “tenth justice”—isn’t just anti-abortion. D. John Sauer opposes contraception, and has argued as much to the Supreme Court. Good times.

Remember the Hobby Lobby case? This landmark SCOTUS ruling allowed the craft store giant to deny employees insurance plans that cover contraception. In 2014, Sauer submitted an amicus brief in support of Hobby Lobby, arguing that some kinds of birth control “function as abortifacients.”

If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, you know that conservatives have been quietly advancing this argument for years—laying the groundwork to ban birth control. They claim that IUDs, emergency contraception, and sometimes any hormonal contraceptive interrupt the implantation of a fertilized egg—and are therefore ‘abortions.’

That’s exactly Sauer’s argument:

“Regardless of the Government’s definition of ‘abortion,’ the Catholic faith views the destruction of a human embryo at any time after conception—including during ‘the interval between conception and implantation of the embryo’—as an abortion, and gravely wrongful.”

One of the reasons conservatives are so hot on this argument is that it allows them to target birth control while claiming they’d never ever target birth control. After all, they say—they’re just banning ‘abortion’! Read more from Abortion, Every Day on this tactic below:

The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part I)

The New York Times published a piece last week digging into Sauer’s anti-abortion bonafides, which is worth a read if you’d like to learn more. In addition to his work on Hobby Lobby, Sauer has done trainings with Alliance Defending Freedom (the group that overturned Roe), represented the anti-abortion activists behind deceptively edited videos attacking Planned Parenthood, and—just to round things out—his father founded Missouri Roundtable for Life.

Freya Riedlin, the senior federal policy counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Times that between him and Attorney General Pam Bondi, “they’re in a position to really cause grave and longstanding damage to reproductive rights.”

Quick hits:

• New data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reports that more than six in 10 Americans support abortion rights;

• Rachel Rebouché is at The Nation explaining why the SCOTUS abortion case is about more than ‘defunding’ Planned Parenthood;

• Finally, a Live Action anti-abortion activist was punched in the face after antagonizing a New York woman in a gotcha ‘interview’. No link because the only places covering this are right-wing, but thought you all might want to know!

“If we stop, they’ve won. If we stop, my baby’s death was in vain. I’m not stopping.”

- Shanette Williams, whose daughter Amber Nicole Thurman was killed by a Georgia abortion ban

Coming Soon

In the newsletter tomorrow: More on the Trojan Horse bill in Texas that was in front of a House committee; a study showing the impact of abortion bans on teenagers; two states that had their Title X funding restored; and Trump cuts to the CDC that will impact reproductive and maternal health.