The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Projecting

And their buzzwords give it away

In 2018, about 60% of voters said they didn’t think the Supreme Court would really kill Roe. The same Republican politicians who have dedicated their careers to terrorizing abortion providers and patients insinuated that feminists were crazy for even suggesting this would happen.

To use precise language, then-Sen. Ben Sasse wrote off the concerns as “hysteria.” Here’s what he said to Brett Kavanaugh at the then-nominee’s confirmation hearing:

“There have been screaming protesters saying, ‘Women are going to die,’ at every hearing for decades. So, the fact that the hysteria has nothing to do with you means that we should ask: What’s the hysteria coming from?”

Kavanaugh, a serially accused sexual assailant, was rapidly confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate. Within four years, he voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Even as feminists’ warnings have materialized into a horrific reality, we remain dismissed as hysterical—by the same anti-abortion leaders who are quite literally killing us! Now we’re “hysterical” for warning that Republicans want to impose a national abortion ban and that they’re targeting birth control.

This is the future anti-abortion extremists want: One in which we’re not just stripped of our most basic rights, but also deemed crazy for fighting back—even just for pointing out what’s being done to us.

Gaslighting and projection are an art form among the anti-abortion movement—they have it down to a science. For decades before the Dobbs ruling and the spread of abortion bans, GOP lawmakers hollowed out access to abortion by passing one restriction after another, and justified nearly all of these laws with faux “women’s safety” concerns. They continue it even now as bans kill women, and the shuttering of abortion clinics increases both maternal mortality and intimate partner violence homicides.

As we near the end of 2025, key trends in anti-abortion messaging foreshadow an escalation in these strategies. In particular, the anti-abortion movement is zeroing in on feminist language: twisting buzzwords like ‘coercion,’ obsessively equating abortion access with abuse, and accusing abortion-rights activists of ‘gaslighting’—a tactic straight out of the patriarchal toolbox.

“Coercion” panics

Abortion, Every Day reported in 2023 that anti-abortion leaders identified “coercion” as their most effective talking point to stigmatize and attack abortion rights—because, as one anti-abortion leader explained, “No one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.” Since then, anti-abortion extremists have made ‘coercion’ into their full-time job. (There’s a reason AED flagged the term as “anti-abortion activists’ favorite word of 2025.”)

Let’s start with Louisiana: the state is currently trying to extradite and prosecute a New York provider who allegedly mailed abortion pills into the state for a teenage patient. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called Dr. Maggie Carpenter a “drug dealer who victimized a child.” The state also arrested the patient’s mother on criminal abortion charges, accusing her of ‘coercing’ the teen into ending her pregnancy.

Tellingly, the mother wasn’t charged with ‘coercion’—there wasn’t enough evidence—but that didn’t stop Republicans from making it the centerpiece of their PR campaign for the case.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said, “This case is about coercion. Plain and simple.” Murrill tweeted, “The allegations in this case have nothing to do with reproductive health care, this is about coercion.” And Katie Daniel, the director of legal affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said “This case exposes how mail-order abortion drugs are fueling an epidemic of coercion…”

A few months later, AED discovered that Murrill was seeking the extradition of a second abortion provider—Dr. Remy Coeytaux of California, accused of shipping pills that were used in a ‘coerced’ abortion. The revelation came in a suit Murrill filed against the FDA seeking to end telehealth access to abortion pills. She insisted that telemedicine medication abortion endangers abuse victims and enables ‘coercion’:

“Without a requirement for an in-person office visit to prevent coercion… anyone can obtain mifepristone and pressure or trick a woman into taking it.”

Louisiana has even been leading the legislative charge weaponizing ‘coercion’: In July, Gov. Jeff Landry signed a wildly insidious bill to “protect” so-called “victims of abortion drug dealers”—an effort to sweepingly frame anyone who takes abortion pills as abuse victims, and abortion pill providers as abusers.

This isn’t just about one state, though; examples of anti-abortion extremists invoking ‘coercion’-based concerns are endless. National conservative leaders, for example, drop the talking point any chance they get: Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser says abortion pills lead to “new horror stories…day after day of women coerced and drugged against their will.”

The Justice Foundation even provides template letters for anti-abortion activists to pressure police and other community leaders to intervene and stop abortions by framing them as coerced—even when they’re not. One script directs people to tell police officers that failing to stop a coerced abortion “may subject you to personal liability,” among other inflammatory language:

“An involuntary abortion case is also a potential criminal case such as homicide, child abuse, kidnapping, domestic partner violence, etc., depending on the specific facts and upon your state’s criminal law.”

The projection is astounding and entirely deliberate. Take anti-abortion attorney Jonathan Mitchell, who filed a suit against Aid Access and its founder Rebecca Gomperts, for allegedly mailing abortion pills that were given to a woman without her knowledge.

The goal is to sweepingly associate access to abortion pills with abuse and coercion. In reality, Gomperts told AED, it’s abortion restrictions that actually endanger abuse victims: many of their patients are victims who use at-home abortion pills because they’re more private. Gomperts says:

“Anti-abortion groups are using people in tragic situations, vulnerable situations, and weaponizing them for their political aims, and that is disgusting.”

And that’s the thing: Time and again we’ve seen how abortion bans present the most significant threat to abuse victims’ safety, and how they function as a tool in the toolbox of abusers. All evidence shows that bans have rendered abuse victims more vulnerable than ever in a country where homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant people.

Since Dobbs, abortion bans have led to 9,000 additional incidents of intimate partner violence in states that restrict abortion. The National Domestic Violence Hotline’s tracking showed that in the first year after Dobbs, reported reproductive coercion incidents—or acts in which an abuser controls someone’s reproductive decisions or punishes them for these decisions—doubled, as abusers wield forced pregnancy to exercise ever greater control over and violence on their victims.

Abortion bans are, innately, “a form of state-sponsored gender-based violence in itself,” Anne Glatz, co-director at the Sanctuary for Families’ Reproductive Abuse Initiative, told me in June.

That is the reproductive “coercion” we should be talking about. Instead, over and over, this word falls out of anti-abortion activists’ mouths as a pretext to further restrict access to the abortion care that could save victims’ lives.

Gaslighting about who’s gaslighting

Ever since becoming mainstreamed in the late 2010s, the word “gaslighting” gets thrown around a lot—lately, by the anti-abortion leaders who have, ironically, been gaslighting all of us forever.

Just as they do with ‘coercion’, conservatives invoking ‘gaslighting’ are co-opting feminist language. (Perhaps because they know feminism is a hell of a lot more popular than what they’re pushing!) Take anti-abortion columnist Jason Ratz, writing about Americans’ reaction to the defunding of reproductive healthcare providers:

“You’re being gaslit around defunding Planned Parenthood, and you shouldn’t fall for it. Don’t fall for this emotional blackmail.”

The eye roll-inducing, projection-heavy column by Ratz reflects that broader trend: anti-abortion leaders want to make us look crazy for warning or raising awareness about the horrific impacts of abortion bans.

Some of you will remember this: During Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s only presidential debate, Trump claimed that the overturning of Roe was popular. Here’s how Harris replied:

“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that.”

Harris was referencing a particular story about a woman named Jaci Statton—but there were certainly more than just one. Still, a right-wing influencer clipped her remarks in a viral TikTok and said, “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.”

At the time, I interviewed one Idaho woman who had an experience similar to Statton’s; she told me she’s “done so much work to get my story out there and they always say ‘fake news,’ no matter the evidence I bring… It’s tough to constantly face disbelief, especially from those in power or who have platforms to influence others.”

Even when women are believed, we’re gaslit about why these nightmares are happening. In June, a Florida Republican congresswoman recounted almost dying from an ectopic pregnancy after being denied an emergency abortion. But instead of blaming the state’s six-week ban, she pointed the finger at abortion rights activists for “fearmongering” and scaring doctors out of providing legal care.

And when ProPublica in 2024 published the stories of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller—both killed by Georgia’s abortion ban—the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America launched a half-million-dollar ad campaign using the women’s names and likenesses, stating: “Candi and Amber should be alive. The Left’s scare tactics are deadly.”

Anti-abortion activists maintain that we’re the ones gaslighting the nation about the dangers associated with these laws that are killing patients.

In recent years, the anti-abortion effort to co-opt feminism has grown more and more shameless. For example, many of the most front-facing anti-abortion leaders at powerful national organizations are women; and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch represented the state at the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case that killed Roe. And, as I reported for Jezebel in 2022, anti-abortion organizations have increasingly, very deliberately used the images of women of color to promote their propaganda materials.

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there: Take, for instance, their obsessive claims to “protect children.” In 2024, a Missouri Republican objected to adding a rape exception to the state’s abortion ban because he argued the amendment would “bring back the institution of abortion so that kids can get abortions in the state of Missouri” and “a one-year-old could get an abortion under this.” (To state the obvious, a one-year-old can’t get pregnant.)

Anti-abortion activists have also invoked faux concerns about “child safety” to stoke panic—claiming abortion rights ballot measures would let minors secretly access care, and justifying their so-called “trafficking” laws that criminalize anyone who helps young people get an abortion.

But it’s abortion restrictions that pose a threat to children’s safety: Texas’ own state Health Department reported earlier this year that over the course of 2023, six children under 12 were among at least 105 minors who had to leave the state to have abortions.

And I could write a whole column about the gaslighting and hypocrisy behind the anti-abortion movement’s promise that they don’t want to punish women—even as a growing sect of “abolitionists” openly argues for abortion patients to be jailed for life or given the death penalty.

At the core of every conservative lie and rhetorical strategy is this truth: Abortion bans are forced pregnancy, and forced pregnancy is an irredeemably cruel, vastly unpopular act of violence. Every other lie, rhetorical tactic, obfuscation, and projection from the anti-abortion movement hides behind that fundamental fact.