Planned Parenthood Got Its Funding Back—and Antis Are Furious
7.7.26
Click to skip ahead: Anti-Abortion Activists Crash Out Over Planned Parenthood Funding; In the Nation: The HHS is Pandering to Anti-Abortion Extremists; ‘Abortion in the Water’ Isn’t Going Anywhere; Young People Most Likely to Know About Telemedicine Abortion; Antis Claim ‘Free Speech’ Victory in Delaware; What ‘Reproductive Genocide’ Looks Like; Republican Lawmaker Denied Care for Her Ectopic Pregnancy
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Anti-Abortion Activists Crash Out Over Planned Parenthood Funding
The defunding provision of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” expired this weekend; that means Planned Parenthood clinics and other reproductive health care providers can once again bill Medicaid for services other than abortion.
It’s welcome news after a year that saw tens of thousands of patients cut off from basic health care—but as Nora Walsh-DeVries of Planned Parenthood Action Fund told POLITICO, the damage is “irreparable.” After all, health centers that have already closed can’t just reopen now that the funding is back.
Republicans are also still pursuing a permanent ‘defund’ law, and a Supreme Court decision last year allows individual states to block Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood and other clinics. That list so far: Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.
But anti-abortion leaders aren’t exactly happy either, and have spent the last several days throwing an absolute hissy fit. Students for Life just gave all of Congress an ‘F’ rating on their made-up, ‘pro-life’ report cards. And Sen. Josh Hawley, one of the most rabidly anti-abortion members of Congress, suggested that Republicans’ failure to restore the ‘defund’ provision could cost them their base in the midterms:
“That was really taking the pro-life movement and pro-life voters for granted, because you’re depending on those voters to turn out and vote for you in November.”
But abortion doesn’t drive Republican voters in the same way it drives Democrats; and given the broad popularity of reproductive rights, the Trump administration saw defunding Planned Parenthood as a political liability this critical election year. Instead, GOP leaders in Congress focused this year’s reconciliation bill on immigration and military spending.
When it’s all said and done, the restoration of Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health providers—for now—is a relief. But it’s hardly the end of this fight.
In the Nation: The HHS is Pandering to Anti-Abortion Extremists
Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that they’re reorganizing the Department’s Office for Civil Rights to prioritize ‘conscience and religious freedom’—AKA, granting ever more protections to anti-abortion groups, no matter what extremism they engage in.
According to The Guardian, an HHS official says this new structure will “[protect] conscience rights, [address] race-based discrimination in a color-blind manner, and anti-Christian bias, and restoring biological truth.” This comes at the same time that Trump’s DOJ recently issued a sweeping report classifying anti-abortion harassment and violence as protected Christian speech.
We’ve seen this before: language about ‘religious freedom’ in health care is often weaponized to create more leeway for insurers, employers, and other institutions to deny birth control coverage or abortion referrals. Liz Sepper, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, agrees—telling The Guardian this shift in priorities is specifically meant to target reproductive rights.
“I think it’s a really clear signal to the right-to-life movement that some of their priorities are going to be coming to the top at the agency,” Sepper said. She warned that EMTALA—the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act—could also come under attack if the administration argues that hospitals and providers have a ‘conscience’ right to refuse emergency abortion care.
The move wouldn’t be a surprise: last year, the Trump administration rescinded federal guidance requiring hospitals to provide patients with emergency abortions. And religious hospitals across the U.S. already claim they don’t need to provide that care:
Tellingly, the agency also announced that it will protect “the right to be free from coercion in HHS-conducted or funded programs.”
‘Coercion’ is currently a buzzword among the anti-abortion movement, which aims to present abortion access itself as abuse—and, now, it seems, policies protecting abortion access as ‘coercive’ too. To be clear: Trump’s HHS is more or less claiming that merely asking doctors to do their jobs is “coercive.” In the vein of DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim-offender), anti-abortion leaders are framing themselves as the victims while inflicting a total war on access to basic health care.
‘Abortion in the Water’ Isn’t Going Anywhere
Republicans are escalating their demands that the government investigate abortion medication (and remains) in Americans’ drinking water. As Abortion, Every Day has long reported, this baseless conspiracy theory is meant to further restrict medication abortion—which has no environmental impact—and punish women who use the medication by forcing them to collect their pregnancy remains in ‘catch kits.’
Republicans started lobbying the EPA last year to test the nation’s water supply for mifepristone; and this April, the federal agency conceded—recommending that states test their drinking water for both abortion pills and birth control, putting the drugs on a federal list of potential “contaminants.”
We got a glimpse conservatives’ messaging on the strategy last week, when Tony Perkins, president of the ultra-conservative Family Research Council, hosted Kansas Rep. Ron Bryce on the issue. Bryce called for the FDA to conduct a new environmental impact review of mifepristone, saying the old study is “obsolete” because “the levels of mifepristone in our wastewater have grown dramatically.”
The Republican lawmaker also claimed, without evidence, that ‘abortion in the water’ is behind declining fertility and birth rates—then used the total absence of data as the reason we need more data:
“People are not having babies like they used to. Part of that may be due to the abortion pill in the water. That’s more or less a theory. … There’s no raw scientific data we can rely on, so we really need the EPA to do their job and have some scientific data on it.”
To call this a “theory” is generous: it’s nonsense. But expect to see the anti-abortion movement continue to push the claims anyway.
Telemedicine access to abortion pills has been a lifeline for access since the end of Roe—and that’s exactly why conservatives are going after them with such force. The far-right Restoration of America Foundation (ROAF) just published a report estimating that blue state abortion providers mailed more than 328,000 abortion pills into banned states between July 2023 and December 2025.
This data analysis from anti-abortion activists comes amid their broader push to demonize medication abortion and the blue state providers who mail it. These numbers are meant to be inflammatory—but really, it’s inspirational to see this many pregnant people in states with bans get the care they need.
Young People Most Likely to Know About Telemedicine Abortion
Telemedicine abortion is one of the primary reasons the national abortion rate hasn’t dropped—patients in banned states are having abortion pills shipped to them from out-of-state providers. But a new study from the Guttmacher Institute shows that less than a third of abortion patients know that pills can be mailed anywhere in the U.S.
The good news? Young people—respondents under the age of 20 years-old—were the most likely to be aware of this option. For the most part, awareness decreased with age.
This, in particular, is a fascinating stat that speaks to generational shifts in how we’re accessing information—and the role of social media in how many of us may be learning about abortion access.
Also interesting: patients who traveled to a clinic from another state were less likely to know that pills could be shipped, and nearly a quarter of those out-of-state patients (23%) said they feared legal trouble if they sought telemedicine abortion.
This comes in a moment when banned states are increasingly desperate to censor information about telemedicine and online resources: the anti-abortion movement knows that their greatest weapon is blocking access to information. Guttmacher’s research, showing how limited public knowledge about online abortion pills remains, speaks to exactly why that is.
Antis Claim ‘Free Speech’ Victory in Delaware
Crisis pregnancy centers are only growing more insulated from accountability—with Republican lawmakers passing legislation that prohibits state regulation, and, increasingly, ‘free speech’ lawsuits.
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, for example, just settled with the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)—agreeing to no longer enforce a state law regulating CPCs.
Under SB 300, CPCs would have to post notices online and in their centers stating that they’re “not licensed as a medical facility by the state of Delaware and has no licensed medical provider who provides or directly supervises the provision of services.” This is crucial, as the fake clinics often rope in abortion seekers by posing as real clinics.
In addition to no longer enforcing the law, Delaware must pay roughly $50,000 in attorney’s fees to ADF, the Christian Post reports (🚩).
Anti-abortion groups are celebrating as CPCs become alarmingly untouchable. In addition to receiving exponentially more funding since the end of Roe, states like Kansas and Wyoming have passed “CARE Act” laws to shield CPCs from state regulation. And the Supreme Court just sided with a New Jersey CPC network that invoked ‘free speech’ to dodge a state investigation. It’s the same First Amendment playbook ADF is using to shield anti-abortion activists who harass abortion clinics in violation of state and federal law.
Let’s be clear why anti-abortion leaders go to such lengths to protect these facilities: CPCs exist to prey on potential abortion seekers and function as the anti-abortion movement’s surveillance arm.
What ‘Reproductive Genocide’ Looks Like
Last week, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report documenting “reproductive genocide” by the Israeli military: by systematically destroying reproductive health facilities across Gaza—and creating conditions that render it impossible for women to safely give birth or take care of children—Israel is preventing a captive population from surviving and reproducing.
In October 2023, Israel destroyed the sole International Planned Parenthood Federation facility in Gaza; and maternal mortality, c-sections without anesthetic, and miscarriages under extreme duress have all surged amid the war. The report also includes harrowing testimony from Palestinian men and women who’ve been left infertile after extreme sexual violence by Israeli soldiers over the last several decades—indicating a systematic pattern of reproductive violence.
In October 2023, U.S. reproductive rights organizations laid out in a letter how reproductive justice is a global movement that demands funding for health care, not war.
“We see clear parallels between barriers faced by our callers and the deliberate obstacles to healthcare for Palestinians. Just as working class communities across the South are denied abortion access, Palestinians are denied both basic and life-saving maternal care every day.”
You can read the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s full report and learn more about their vital work here.
Republican Lawmaker Denied Care for Her Ectopic Pregnancy
AED readers surely remember Rep. Kat Cammack—the GOP congresswoman who, after being denied timely care for her ectopic pregnancy under Florida’s ban, blamed doctors, pro-choice advocates, anyone but the law itself. It’s a favorite refrain of the anti-abortion movement—insisting the public health crisis their laws created is really the fault of doctors misreading those laws, or abortion rights activists scaring providers away from legal care.
Last month, Cammack sat down for an interview with journalist Tara Palmeri and recounted the abortion story she first shared in 2025. Days later, she pressed Palmeri not to publish the interview—then, once it ran, publicly attacked the journalist for endangering her.
Cammack raised concerns about threats against her and her family, claiming that the interview—which touched on her views about abortion and the Epstein files— could exacerbate those threats.
This entire debacle is fairly confusing: Cammack has repeatedly spoken publicly about her abortion—which she refuses to call an abortion—for well over a year now. She also introduced a national abortion ban in May.
Of course, Cammack’s emphasis on her own safety is nothing if not ironic: violent threats and attacks on abortion providers are surging with the encouragement of the Trump administration. And abortion bans, like the one Cammack introduced earlier this year, keep creating the exact kind of health crisis she lived through herself.
There’s nothing new or surprising about anti-abortion women and hypocrisy.
Check for Viagra metabolites in the water too. Men seem to be as usual completely left out of this equation.
The GOP has no evidence to support abortion pills are contaminating our water so they’re asking Trump’s EPA to gin some up. 🙄