Abortion Isn't Going Anywhere—No Matter What

9.10.25

Click to skip ahead: On Violence, a few words from Jessica on Charlie Kirk’s death. A brief but important reminder that Abortion Isn’t Going Anywhere. In the States, news from California, Illinois, South Carolina, and more. Gen Z’s Gender Gap has some fascinating data on what young people think about children and “success.” Policing Pregnancy reports that a woman has been arrested for her pregnancy outcome…32 years ago. In the Courts, the latest in anti-abortion ‘free speech’ lawsuits. And Listen Up to a new podcast about Latin America’s Green Wave movement.

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On Violence

Before we get into the news of the day, a few words about the death of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk: For those unfamiliar with Kirk, he was an ultra right-wing personality who had a penchant for saying women shouldn’t have jobs, that abortion is murder, and that trans people are a “throbbing middle finger to God.” He was best known for founding Turning Point USA and traveling to college campuses to ‘debate’ students. It was at one of those campuses, in Utah, where he was shot and killed today.

I feel for Kirk’s family, and for the people who care about him. And I’m worried—very worried—about what this means for the rise in political violence more generally. It was less than three months ago that a shooter killed Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. Abortion clinics and providers are facing mounting threats of harm while the current administration pardons dangerous extremists.

And that’s to say nothing of everyday American gun violence: somehow, inexplicably, we live in a country where children are regularly killed at their desks. Just hours ago, in fact, three children were shot in a Colorado classroom.

For years, the conservative response to this horror has been little more than a collective political shrug and a “thoughts and prayers” tweet. Or they react like Kirk, who once said, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

So I know that in a moment like this one, it can be hard to muster empathy for those who dedicate their lives to making others suffer. I wouldn’t even ask anyone to try. But I know that none of us want to live like this—getting terrifying news alerts, watching gory videos, and arguing online about the acceptable response to someone’s death. It’s awful, all of it.

And I hate that I have to say this, but I will anyway: no one deserves this.

Over the next few days, we can expect the response from conservatives to be extreme and dangerous. We’ll see an increase in inflammatory rhetoric and claims that the left is inherently violent—even as conservative policies quite literally kill people here and abroad. I don’t know what the answer is beyond taking a breath, gathering ourselves, and getting back to work.

For now, for me, that will have to be enough. - Jessica

Abortion Isn’t Going Anywhere

Some much-needed encouraging news: After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened providers with $100,000 fines for mailing pills into the state, at least one provider saw requests for the medication increase.

Debra Lynch, founder of Her Safe Harbor—one of the groups Paxton targeted—said, “We surpassed 250 [requests] by 8 o’clock in the morning.” Most were for advance provision pills: people stocking up in case they need abortion medication in the future.

Both Lynch and Aid Access’ Rebecca Gomperts say they “don’t fear fines or jail time at all”—maintaining that Texas lacks the legal authority to punish them.

As you all know, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are waging an all-out war on abortion medication: bringing lawsuits, proposing legislation, weaponizing AGs’ offices, and pressuring the Trump administration to ban the pills or gut telehealth access. And those are just the legal attacks!

Still, providers like Her Safe Harbor and Aid Access continue to serve patients each day—and those determined to end their pregnancies keep finding ways to do so, in spite of state law.

It’s like Shout Your Abortion says: “We will save us.”

Need abortion pills? Check out our resources page for info.

In the States

Let’s keep it going with the good news: We’re keeping a close eye on California, where lawmakers are set to vote on legislation that would allow providers to keep their names off prescription labels for abortion pills.

This crucial privacy protection couldn’t come at a better time: Not only are states like Texas and Louisiana doggedly trying to punish blue state doctors for mailing abortion pills, but violence against providers is on the rise. (The National Abortion Federation does vital work tracking those threats and violence.)

These are people facing legal punishment, financial risk, and serious real-life harm—all so they can help pregnant people get the care they deserve. The least we can do is help protect their names and privacy.

Even better: AB 260 would also keep patient names off abortion pill labels, an extra layer of protection that’s especially important for those in abusive or controlling relationships.

All that said—the newsletter wouldn’t be complete without one small media quibble! This NPR headline had me a bit irritated today:

The legislation would not allow doctors to provide medication “anonymously.” Obviously, there would still be records of what provider prescribed the pills—that information simply wouldn’t be visible on the packaging label.

Wording it this way—saying folks could prescribe “drugs anonymously”—makes the whole thing sound unsavory or unsafe. Language around abortion rights has never been more important than it is right now, so let’s make sure we’re using it wisely.

Lest you think I’m always complaining about media coverage, here’s a piece that deserves some kudos: Chicago Magazine has a profile of Hope Clinic in Illinois, which offers abortion care up until 34 weeks.

In a moment when Republicans are working so hard to demonize abortion later in pregnancy—and make providers sound scary, unsafe, and unsanitary in general—I really appreciated the set up of this piece:

“Patients here sit on comfortable mid-century modern couches accented in rose gold and check in at a desk next to a purple-and-sage moss wall. Rooms for exams and consultations are softly lit with pink Himalayan salt lamps glowing against exposed brick walls. Artwork lining the halls evokes the millennial girlboss aesthetic of the 2010s, with paintings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and posters proclaiming ‘Women Don’t Owe You Shit.’”

We need more coverage like this—stories that take you inside clinics, and debunk conservative scare tactics.

I told you yesterday that Washington is set to destroy 30,000 doses of mifepristone—medication from the state’s stockpile. We’re waiting to hear if Democratic leaders are going to find a way to make use of the medication before it expires, and hope to have more news soon.

In the meantime, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reports that Oregon’s stockpile of abortion pills isn’t set to expire until 2028. That’s because Gov. Tina Kotek took the state’s existing stockpile—which was set to expire this month—and exchanged it with drug manufacturer Danco for pills with a later expiration date.

The state has about 14,000 doses of the medication remaining.

One final bit of state news: We know how rapid the abortion news cycle is, but don’t let anything distract you from the fact that South Carolina is trying to ban birth control. For the second time this year!

The attack on contraception is just one part of the bigger nightmare bill we reported on earlier this week: SB 323 is a total ban that would punish abortion patients as murderers, ban pro-choice websites, and make it a crime to share information about abortion—among other horrors. And contraception? The bill redefines it in such a way that Republicans could claim IUDs and emergency contraception aren’t really birth control at all.

While SB 323 failed the last time conservative lawmakers introduced it, South Carolina advocates tell AED that they’re more concerned this time around—in part thanks to recent Republican gains in the state legislature. Here’s what Palmetto State Abortion Fund’s Ashlyn Preaux said:

“We lost all three Republican women senators after they voted against the six-week ban. We lost at least two Democratic senators in the 2024 election as well…. Without enormous pushback I don’t see any leadership on the Republican side this time around to oppose this bill.”

Want to help? You can take action by calling on your legislators to reject this utterly horrific bill here. And remember—this legislation is meant to be a national model, they’re just using South Carolina as a testing ground. So if you want to know what to watch out for in your state, considering familiarizing yourself with SB 323.

Quick hits:

• Some late-breaking news that we’ll dig into tomorrow: Missouri Planned Parenthood has made a new filing asking the court to allow medication abortions;

• Texas anti-abortion activists think HB 7 will be a model for other states;

• Finally, never underestimate the influence of a strong, local letter to the editor! Here’s one from Lawrence, Kansas, where activists are raising alarms about a new municipal surveillance program and its link to attacks on abortion, trans youth, and immigrants.

Gen Z’s Gender Gap

You all know about the growing gender gap among young Americans: younger men are skewing more conservative while their female counterparts get more progressive. Now, new polling from NBC News Decision Desk offers a bit of insight into how that divide impacts the way Gen Z thinks about success, family, children, and more.

It’s a fascinating bit of data.

When it comes to Donald Trump, voters 18-29 years-old are broken down pretty much how you would expect: Most disapprove of the president’s performance, and there’s a massive 21-point gender gap. The same is true for young people’s awareness of sexism: 44% of women said men have an advantage in the workplace, while only 27% of men thought the same.

Things got really interesting, however, when pollsters asked young Americans how they personally define “success.” Getting married and having children ranked much higher on men’s list than women’s—a divide that grows even more when you account for politics. Young men who voted for Trump cited “having children” as their number one definition of success; for young female Harris voters, it was their second-least important response.

Even young women who voted for Trump placed having children low on their list! They put it behind “achieving financial independence,” “having a job or career you find fulfilling,” “owning your own home,” “being spiritually grounded,” and “having enough money to do the things you want to do.”

It’s no wonder conservatives spend so much time, money, and energy cultivating a stable of ‘tradwife’ influencers—or why Turning Point USA’s conference for young women essentially told attendees to find a husband and quit birth control. They may have captured young Republican women’s votes, but it’s clear they haven’t convinced them that being trapped in the home is just aces.

If conservatives want more women to have children—and for young women to see motherhood as a sign of success—they might consider not making it a punishment for sex. Just a thought!

For more on the way conservatives are targeting young women, read below:

We Need to Talk About the Pink-Pill Pipeline

Policing Pregnancy

Well this is terrifying: this week, a 58-year-old Iowa woman was arrested and charged with first degree murder—32 years after police uncovered remains from her pregnancy in a landfill. Using advances in DNA technology, police identified the woman decades later—a chilling expansion of reproductive police state technology.

Listen to our friends over at Pregnancy Justice explain how this goes down:

In other words: something as simple as a relative using 23andMe could help police trace pregnancy remains back to you.

This kind of genetic surveillance is just another tool in the state’s toolbox: We’ve seen police wield people’s online search histories, text messages, and medical histories as evidence in pregnancy criminalization cases—even location data can implicate people via reverse geofencing.

Still, the most common routes of criminalization continue to be the old-fashioned ones: like snitches. (There’s a reason anti-abortion activists are so fond of bounty hunter laws.)

As this case moves forward, it’s worth pausing on how police themselves describe it. “I am grateful for the dedication, partnerships, and technological advances that have made this arrest possible,” said Iowa City Police Chief Dustin Liston—about the decision to hunt down a woman for the outcome of her pregnancy, three decades later.

Bone-chilling.

In the Courts

There’s something especially infuriating about watching anti-abortion activists bring ‘free speech’ suits as they pass laws trying to ban pro-choice websites, or criminalize sharing information about abortion with a teenager. Still, here we are.

Over in Minnesota, two pharmacists are suing Walgreens and the state pharmacy board, claiming they were punished for refusing to dispense gender-affirming medications and abortion pills. The pair are seeking a ruling that declares no state law requires them to dispense medication against their religious beliefs—and an acknowledgement that Walgreens violated their First Amendment rights.

If this case sounds familiar, it’s because there’s been so many similar ones in the past few years. Alliance Defending Freedom and the Thomas More Society always have a few on their docket, fought under the auspices of religious freedom and free speech. The freedom of patients who just want to get their fucking medication goes unremarked on.

We’ve seen women denied pills for miscarriage management, little girls refused pain meds because they’re of “reproductive age,” and—of course—patients forced to travel long distances just to get birth control.

But it’s not just access to medication at stake: conservatives are fighting for the right to deny certain people treatment. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that a woman in Tennessee was refused prenatal care because she was unmarried. That nightmare was the result of the state’s Medical Ethics Defense Actdfmind —which allows doctors, hospitals, insurers, and others to deny care based on their personal religious or moral beliefs.

In more ‘free speech’ lawsuit news, Colorado anti-abortion activist Wendy Faustin is still at it. (Seriously, we first wrote about her suit over two years ago!) The “sidewalk counselor” is trying to repeal the state’s buffer zone law, insisting that it violates her First Amendment rights by preventing her from getting in patients’ faces.

Her suit claims that Colorado’s eight-foot abortion clinic buffer zone forces Faustin to “raise her voice at patients from outside the zone—a mode of communication sharply at odds with the compassionate message she wishes to convey.” Compassion, huh?

A federal judge ruled against Faustin in August, but she’s appealing that decision at the US District Court for the District of Colorado. The end-goal isn’t just about Colorado law. Conservative legal groups—which have a number of similar cases in the works—hope to bring the issue all the way to the Supreme Court and overturn Hill v. Colorado, the case that established abortion clinic buffer zones.

If SCOTUS decides to take up one of these cases, the national implications would be massive. Because remember, since Roe was overturned, threats and violence against clinics and providers have skyrocketed. Stalking and burglaries are up more than 200%, arson has doubled, and providers are regularly doxxed and threatened with death. In just the last three years, we’ve seen clinics burned to the ground and maniacs drive cars into them. That’s to say nothing of the trauma inflicted on patients simply trying to access care.

So when you see a random lawsuit about an anti-abortion weirdo, please know it’s not just about one person being terrible—they have a whole army of terrible people behind them.

Finally, let’s check in on Indiana, where the Seventh Circuit Court sided with a high school that suspended a student for distributing anti-abortion propaganda flyers from Students for Life in 2022. Mind you, the high school allowed the student to start a Students for Life club and express her anti-abortion beliefs—she was suspended for violating a broader rule against posting non-neutral flyers across the school.

Even as anti-abortion extremists hold almost all institutional power in the nation, from the Supreme Court, to the White House, to Congress, they still insist on playing victim. This lawsuit is just the latest example.

And it’s also an example of the anti-abortion movement’s insidious efforts to infiltrate schools—probably because as universally popular as abortion rights are, they’re even more popular among young people.

Listen Up

The terrific podcast Outlawed just launched another season with two new episodes—the one below digs into the Green Wave movement in Latin America and what we can learn from our neighbors to the South:

That’s it for today, folks. I’m going to try to get a few hours of sleep, and I’d recommend you do the same. We hope that everyone is holding up okay, and that you talk to someone about abortion today.