The Anti-Abortion Movement Has a New Language Trick

6.2.25

Click to skip ahead: Anti-Abortion Glossary tells you about “bereavement rights.” Policing Pregnancy looks at an abortion prosecution in the UK. In the States, news from Georgia, Kentucky, Colorado, Wisconsin, and more. In the Nation, a new lawsuit on life-saving abortions, and the conservative lawmakers who hope we’ll settle for scraps. You Love to See It highlights a fantastic app—a virtual, bilingual, abortion doula.

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Anti-Abortion Glossary

The latest addition to our growing anti-abortion glossary? “Bereavement rights.”

This one comes from Students for Life—the anti-abortion, anti-contraception organization known for throwing wacky shit at the wall to see what sticks. (They’re the maniacs behind the claim that Americans are “drinking abortions.”)

Now the group has a new focus: they want Republicans to propose a federal ‘Bereaved Parents’ Rights’ Act. Like their call for “clean water,” it sounds innocuous enough. Who doesn’t want to support grieving parents? But as is always the case, this harmless-sounding language is covering up something pretty insidious.

Instead of helping parents, the legislation they’re proposing would actually mandate the burial or cremation of miscarriages—opening the door to arresting women who dispose of their miscarriages ‘improperly’.

The timing of this push is not a coincidence. Over the last few months, a growing number of women have been arrested and prosecuted for their miscarriages: The young woman in Georgia, for example, who was charged with ‘concealing a death’ and ‘abandoning a dead body’ after placing her miscarriage remains in the trash. Or the Texas woman who spent five months in jail for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after miscarrying in a public restroom. And we all remember Brittany Watts in Ohio.

In all of these cases, charges weren’t just dropped because of public outrage—they were dropped because there are no laws dictating how to dispose of a miscarriage. Students for Life wants to change that, making it easier to punish women under the guise of helping bereaved parents.

The group lays out how it works: the federal law would require hospitals to either cremate or bury the remains of a miscarriage, after asking a patient for their wishes.

And while Students for Life frames this as respecting “parents’ rights to the remains of their children,” we know better. This is about codifying fetal personhood—and making it easier to investigate and prosecute pregnancy loss.

After all, even if a federal law like this only applied to hospitals or health centers, the goal is to set a precedent: that there are “wrong” or even criminal ways to dispose of a miscarriage. It’s no accident that Students for Life says they want to stop miscarriage remains from being treated “like trash”—at a time when women are being arrested for doing exactly that.

This is part of the reason I track every bill I can: just last month, I warned that something like this could be on the horizon when Nebraska legislators advanced a bill requiring fetal remains from abortions to be buried or cremated.

We’ll talk more about this tactic in the coming days and weeks—but make sure you’re keeping an eye out.

Policing Pregnancy

I can’t be the only one who watched this nightmare story unfold in the UK: A woman there was prosecuted and taken to trial for having an abortion. After over four years of battling the courts (and media scrutiny), she was finally found not guilty last month.

Abortion is legal in the UK until 24 weeks, but Nicola Packer—who took abortion medication—was further along in her pregnancy than she thought. Hers was one of a rising number of abortion prosecutions in the UK—where police are being specially trained in how to investigate pregnancy losses. (Read Kylie’s piece on this over at Jezebel.)

I highly recommend listening to Packer share her story with The Guardian below—you’ll notice just how many parallels there are between her case and how criminalization works here.

In other criminalization news, make sure you didn’t miss this 404 Media piece I flagged last week: They found that Texas cops tracked an abortion patient using data from an automatic license plate reader (ALPR), which gave them access to over 83,000 cameras across the country. The Guardian followed up on the story, noting that “this is what ‘freedom’ for women in Texas looks like.”

In the States

At least we have good news out of Maine. Great news, in fact: Gov. Janet Mills signed a law today that allows providers to keep their names off of prescription labels for abortion medication.

The law is meant to protect providers in pro-choice states from criminal charges and civil suits. We’ve already seen one New York doctor hit with both, by Louisiana and Texas, respectively. In both cases, Dr. Maggie Carpenter was targeted because her name was found on a prescription label for abortion pills.

Abortion providers in pro-choice states like Carpenter have been a saving grace for patients in states with bans: there are just a handful of them who are shipping out abortion pills, but they’re working overtime to ensure that anyone who needs care gets it—no matter where they live.

Naturally, anti-abortion groups are furious: the extremist organization Live Action¹ claimed today that the Maine law allows for “anonymous abortion pill prescriptions.” (Prescription labels will still carry the practice name of the provider, just not the provider themselves.)

Similar laws have been passed in New York, Colorado, and Washington.

In related news, civil rights groups and healthcare providers are urging Massachusetts lawmakers to update the state’s shield law. They’re lobbying for bills to ensure midwives and attorneys are protected, and to increase data privacy for sensitive health information.

It’s that latter bit that experts seem most concerned about—especially now, in a time when medical records are nearly all electronic.

Maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Chloe Zera pointed out that a college student who has abortion medication prescribed to her in Massachusetts, for example, could have that on her medical record when she goes home to see her doctor in Texas. “Medical records that I use to document my care are almost certainly visible to someone in another state,” she said.

That’s why advocates want the law to require explicit patient consent before certain types of health data can be accessed—and why they’re pushing to keep sensitive information out of prescription monitoring programs altogether.

As Gavi Wolfe, legislative director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, notes: “There is no reason that medications related to reproductive health and gender-affirming care need to be included in its vast database and vulnerable to prying eyes.”

Georgia anti-abortion groups are still trying to distance themselves from the medical and ethical nightmares taking place in their state—from a woman whose body is being kept alive to incubate a fetus, to the patients who’ve died because the state ban prevented doctors from acting quickly.

Martha Zoller of Georgia Life Alliance told the Georgia Recorder that it’s not the state’s abortion ban hurting women, but hospital bureaucracy:

“Once you’ve had a miscarriage or you’re in the process of a miscarriage, there is no heartbeat, so there should be no reason for care to be withheld or anything like that…That’s the over-legalization of the medical care business with not allowing providers to be providers and to do what’s best for patients. And that has nothing to do with the heartbeat bill.”

This, of course, is false. Like other abortion bans, Georgia’s law only allows for miscarriage treatment once the fetal heartbeat has stopped—a mandate that’s killing women who show up to the hospital mid-miscarriage.

Rather than allow doctors to treat their patients without government interference, anti-abortion groups would rather let women die—and then blame healthcare providers for it. Readers who’ve been around a while might remember that I started warning about this tactic back in 2022. Blaming doctors for women’s deaths has been their strategy since the beginning.

Now that the Kentucky ACLU has dropped its legal challenge against the state’s abortion ban, anti-abortion groups are claiming it was what voters wanted. Addia Wuchner, executive director of Kentucky Right to Life, told Kentucky Today, “The dropping of this case is a testament to the will of the people of Kentucky [and] the prayers at work of pro-life advocates.”

The truth, of course, is that most voters in Kentucky actually oppose the state’s abortion ban. And it was just in 2022 that Kentuckians rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment. But conservatives keep using “the will of the people,” as if repeating the talking point will somehow magically make it true.

It’s nice to bring you some positive news every once in a while: Boulder, Colorado is about to get a new abortion clinic, one that specializes in later abortion care. The RISE Collective—which stands for Reproductive Health, Inclusive Care, Support and Empowerment—is made up of the former staff at the Boulder Abortion Clinic, which closed recently with the retirement of Dr. Warren Hern.

The Denver Post reports that the RISE Collective will open in a new location and under a different ownership structure—one where staff members have shares of the clinic. This is fantastic news, and much-needed: there are only a few clinics in the U.S. that offer abortion care later in pregnancy.

In related good news: I’ve been heartened by the local media coverage of RISE, like this short television segment. It’s respectful, not sensationalistic, and highlights the people doing this vital work. More like this, please!

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For information and resources on later abortion care, check out Patient Forward.

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Finally, a new study documents some of the harm done by Wisconsin’s abortion ban. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Collaborative for Reproductive Equity found that in the months after Roe was overturned—and before abortion access was restored—OBGYNs struggled to provide adequate care to pregnant patients.

The study draws on interviews with doctors from across the state, working in a range of settings—hospitals, small clinics, and more. They described watching patients develop serious infections and expressed frustration with institutional guidance that, in some cases, prohibited abortion care unless a patient appeared to be “at death’s door.”

The Cap Times notes that health care providers also noticed increased hospital transfers: if a hospital wasn’t sure if they could legally provide an abortion, they would just transfer the patient to another hospital in the hopes that doctors there would be able to deal with it—medically and legally.

Wisconsin voters are waiting on a decision from the state Supreme Court on abortion rights.

Quick hits:

• A Virginia program offering free contraception to low-income patients has reduced the rate of unintended pregnancy in the state;

• Wisconsin protesters are alerting people about a fake clinic in Milwaukee;

• Finally, Iowa Public Radio dug into what’s happening with Iowa abortion rights, and the closures of four Planned Parenthood clinics:

In the Nation

On Friday, Doctors for America filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit—the group wants to make sure that patients can get life-saving abortions in emergency rooms. I can’t believe that we’re still fighting over whether hospitals can just let women die, but that’s 2025 for you! (And 2024, and 2023…)

For those who need a refresher: The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) is a federal law that requires hospital emergency rooms to provide patients with life-saving and stabilizing care, including abortions. But since Roe was overturned, conservative organizations and Republican-led states have argued they can deny life-saving abortions, claiming either that EMTALA doesn’t apply to them or that the law doesn’t actually require abortion care at all.

That’s a long way of saying they want the right to kill us. Seriously: Last year, ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas doesn’t have to give women life-saving abortions; and Idaho’s EMTALA challenge made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where justices were treated to arguments over how many organs a woman can lose before a state should be required to give her care.

In that case, SCOTUS responded with a non-ruling, kicking the issue back to a lower court. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because the Trump administration dropped the case against Idaho—essentially allowing them to deny women life-saving care without fear of consequence.

Now, Doctors for America has filed a motion to intervene in Catholic Medical Association v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al., which challenges EMTALA’s protections for pregnant people. Organization president Dr. Christine Petrin says, “Doctors should not be forced to choose between following the law and saving a patient’s life.”

The group is represented by the ACLU, Democracy Forward, and the National Women’s Law Center. For some rage-reading, revisit my column about emergency abortions below:

Of Course They Want Us Dead

Meanwhile, some Republican legislators are starting to realize that abortion bans are costing them—not just votes, but young professionals who don’t want to live in states where they or their partners could die during pregnancy. According to Stateline, some of those red-state lawmakers are doing damage control by pushing for ‘family-friendly’ policies normally associated with Democrats—like paid parental leave.

Never ones to offer anything too helpful, however, Republicans’ oh-so-generous leave policies aren’t exactly expansive. In Alabama, for example, Rep. Ginny Shaver proposed and passed a law that gives female state employees eight weeks of paid leave. Male employees get just two weeks.

“We’re trying to attract and retain state employees and teachers, and we’re in competition with everyone around us, and the private sector as well,” Shaver said. You know what’s good for retaining employees? Making sure they don’t bleed out from miscarriages.

Quick hits:

• Students for Life is honing in on 12 GOP senators to help push through the bill defunding Planned Parenthood;

• Two doctors write at US News that keeping Adriana Smith’s body alive against her family’s wishes is a violation of medical ethics;

• Plus, more on the push from twenty Democratic Attorneys General to stop OBGYNs from being forced to travel to Texas for their board certification.

You Love to See It

Just wanted to give a shout out to Aya Contigo, a fantastic organization we’ve just added to the Abortion, Every Day Resources section.

Their privacy-first app offers a live chat with peer counselors for confidential abortion and contraception help. So if someone needs support through their abortion process—whether it’s just information gathering or obtaining pills—Aya Contigo can help.

Think of them as a virtual abortion doula.

The tool is available as a mobile or web app, and was built with and for bilingual women, girls, and gender diverse folks. To find out more, check out this Ms. magazine interview with co-founder and OBGYN Dr. Roopan Gill, or watch the video above.

If you can, consider donating to their GoFundMe.

1. I actually had a typo that called this group *Lice* Action, and I have to tell you it took all of my strength not to leave it that way. Sometimes, I hate being a professional.