The GOP Says Americans Want Abortion Pill Restrictions. They’re Lying.
10.29.25
Click to skip ahead: In Anti-Abortion Strategy, conservatives tout a new, deceptive poll designed to help rollback access to abortion pills. The Power of Storytellers visits with Amber Nicole Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams—who has never stopped speaking out for her daughter. In Attacks on Young People, new research on the impacts of denying minors abortion access. In Tracking ‘Coercion,’ a devastating case in Florida and more on the anti-abortion movement’s ‘coercion’ lies. In the States, news in Iowa, and a preview of bills in New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Florida. In the Courts, a new anti-abortion extremist has been confirmed to the federal judiciary.
Anti-Abortion Strategy
Staring down the barrel of the 2026 midterms, anti-abortion organizations are getting desperate: they claim a new survey shows 71% of voters support in-person dispensing requirements for abortion pills. It doesn’t. And the survey itself? It was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a far-right polling firm whose top client is President Trump. (In 2024, FiveThirtyEight’s pollster rankings showed McLaughlin & Associates has among the highest error ratings, ranking it dead last out of 277 pollsters.)
The survey is meant to fabricate public support for banning telemedicine abortion pills at a time when this method accounts for a quarter of all abortions.
Even as anti-abortion activists invoke that ‘seven in 10’ figure, what they don’t mention is that the poll is built entirely based on disinformation—and that its propagandistic, leading questions are designed to elicit specific answers.
One asks whether or not “big drug companies’ profits should not come before women’s health”—as if anyone would say no! Another asks whether FDA labels should be required “to accurately report the real-world impact of a drug on the patients that take it.”
And while organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America claim that 7 in 10 voters want to “reinstate in-person doctor visits” for abortion medication, the survey didn’t even pose that question. It simply asks whether respondents agree with “requiring a doctor’s visit”—without specifying whether that visit would be telehealth or in-person.
We know why: conservative pollsters knew asking outright wouldn’t get the answers they wanted.
The survey is also riddled with inflammatory language, characterizing abortion pills as dangerous “chemical abortions” and equating abortion pills with “coercion” and “abuse.” Survey respondents were asked whether they agreed with “requiring doctors to screen for and report signs of coercion or abuse before prescribing chemical abortion drugs”—again, without any mention of whether that screening would be virtual or in-person.
In a statement, SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser claimed abortion pills lead to “new horror stories… day after day of women coerced and drugged against their will.” In reality, time and again we’ve seen how abortion bans present the most significant threat to abuse victims’ safety.
SBA also insists that “two-thirds of voters agree abortion drugs are used by abusers to cover up rape and sex trafficking.” The survey says nothing of the sort. All the survey really shows is anti-abortion activists’ disturbing eagerness to lie to the general public.
Still, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are celebrating the survey as a political touchdown—from the The Federalist to Students for Life. Even U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley released a false statement, saying, “The majority of Americans believe we need more restrictions on the abortion pill.”
What comes next is clear: just as they did with the junk science ‘study’ on mifepristone, Republicans will inevitably reference this poll to push their agenda—especially as we wade into key elections.
But these numbers are inseparable from their wildly dishonest context—and from the reality that over eight in 10 voters oppose government involvement in pregnancy. In fact, all credible polling shows that Americans are overwhelmingly pro-choice and want abortion pills to remain legal:
The Power of Storytellers
Amber Nicole Thurman was one of the first reported post-Dobbs deaths—killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. Since then, her mother, Shanette Williams, has emerged as one of the nation’s most powerful voices for abortion rights. This week, 11Alive spoke to Williams about activism, politics—and her daughter’s death.
“Every day I wake up. It’s different,” Williams said. “2022 changed my life. 2024 devastated my life.”
In a moment when the anti-abortion movement is hellbent on distortion and misinformation, voices like hers are more important than ever:
Attacks on Young People
Dobbs has upended abortion access for everyone—but all the more so for minors left navigating a labyrinth of complicated laws, court proceedings, costs, and travel. That’s especially true if they lack supportive parents or guardians.
Today, If/When/How and Human Rights Watch have a released new report on access for minors, based on interviews with dozens of health providers, abortion fund workers, public health researchers, advocates, and attorneys representing young people in judicial bypass cases.
Right now, 25 states where abortion is legal at some point in pregnancy require a health provider to notify or obtain parental consent before providing abortion to a minor. At the same time, Republicans in states like Idaho and Tennessee have passed so-called ‘abortion trafficking’ laws that criminalize most adults who help minors travel out-of-state for care. (Parts of these laws have been blocked in court.) New Hampshire is trying to follow suit.
Jessica Goldberg of If/When/How, a co-author of the report, notes, “Whether a young person can access abortion or not can determine the entire trajectory of their life.”
Indeed, one advocate in the report shares the story of a pregnant high school senior who wanted to go to college:
“She was going to go to nursing school. She had a career planned out. She had parents that were very conservative, and she knew that if her parents found out about the pregnancy, she would not be able to go to school, she’d be forced to continue the pregnancy, and her life goals would have been squashed for her. When the judge granted the judicial bypass, she just sobbed in the courtroom. She was just so relieved.”
Not everyone is so lucky. An abortion clinic worker says one young patient was so afraid of seeking parental notification that she ultimately remained pregnant:
“We scheduled her for an appointment and hoped she could come, and we could walk her through the process [of parental notification or judicial bypass]... We lost contact with her.”
If minors don’t obtain parental consent, they can be required to petition a judge for judicial bypass, which the report characterizes as an “invasive, stressful, often traumatizing process.” That can include tearing a young person apart—scrutinizing their grades and extracurricular activities.
Paradoxically, the state can deem someone who supposedly isn’t ‘mature’ enough to make a basic health care decision to be ‘mature’ enough to parent. As the director of one clinic says in the report: “You can’t decide not to be pregnant, but you can raise a child for the rest of your life with no one questioning your maturity level?”
Even as judicial bypass is a wildly problematic process, anti-abortion activists are still trying to repeal it. As legal challenges surrounding parental involvement laws continue to move through the courts, the report predicts that a case involving minors’ abortion rights could reach the Supreme Court in 2027.
That means it’s never been more urgent for state lawmakers to pass protections for teens, and repeal laws that impede minors’ access to abortion.
Learn about your state’s laws governing minors’ abortion access in the full report—and learn the actions your representatives need to take to change things.
Tracking ‘Coercion’
Since Dobbs, reproductive coercion has been on the rise: In 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that calls to their hotline involving reproductive coercion doubled in the years after Dobbs. The leading cause of death for pregnant people is homicide, often by an abusive partner. And a 2024 study showed that TRAP laws designed to shut down abortion clinics are associated with an increased risk of intimate partner violence-related homicide.
This week, a Florida man was found guilty of killing a pregnant woman in 2022 because she refused to have an abortion. The man, Donovan Faison, could face the death penalty for both the first-degree murder and killing an ‘unborn child', verdicts rendered.
These kinds of cases aren’t new: In 2023, a Texas man was arrested and later convicted of murdering his girlfriend to punish her for having an abortion without his consent. And in 2022, days after Dobbs, a Missouri man was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife a few years earlier; police found that she’d recently searched on her phone, “what to do if your husband is upset you are pregnant.”
We know what comes next: anti-abortion activists will co-opt this tragic case and add it to a their dehumanizing go-to list of examples of abusive men who coerce their victims into abortions, or punish them for not ending their pregnancies. Devastatingly, this does happen. But abortion bans only place women whose partners try to control them in even greater danger.
What anti-abortion activists won’t tell you is that abuse victims are often threatened or hurt by their abusers for seeking abortion—and that in those scenarios, abusive partners function in the same way as anti-abortion state governments.
In the States
Speaking of the devastating public health impacts of abortion bans, NPR spoke to Iowa doctors who blame the state’s abortion ban for the growing OBGYN shortage. Already, the state ranks last in OBGYNs per capita, and the ban—which threatens to terminate physicians’ medical licenses for providing abortions—has rendered it exponentially harder to recruit more to the state. And that makes it even more dangerous to be pregnant in Iowa.
In fact, one doctor recounted providing an emergency, life-saving abortion—only to be interrogated by the hospital afterward:
“Did I have enough evidence? Was her blood count low enough that her life was in danger? Should we have waited until her blood pressure got lower to proceed with terminating the pregnancy?”
Another OBGYN told NPR she moved to Minnesota shortly after Iowa’s ban took effect.
Iowa is hardly an anomaly. Over a third of Idaho OBGYNs have left the state since Dobbs, and studies show medical students are actively avoiding abortion-banned states.
Anti-abortion lawmakers would rather pregnant people have no access to health care at all than have access to abortion.
With November on the horizon, we’re just weeks out from the next legislative session. But state lawmakers across the country have already filed or pre-filed a range of terrifyingly creative anti-abortion laws, including bills recycled from previous sessions—like SB 323 in South Carolina, Republicans’ latest attempt to charge abortion patients with homicide and potentially ban birth control.
Some upcoming bills to keep on your radar:
In New Hampshire, Republicans will try to ban so-called abortion-trafficking with HB 191, which creates the new crime of “Illegal Transporting of a Minor for a Surgical Procedure” if an adult transports a minor “for the purpose of obtaining a surgical procedure” without parental consent. Recall that on the campaign trail, GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte pledged not to further restrict abortion—but we’ll see about that.
Also in New Hampshire: Republicans want to expand the reproductive police state by creating new reporting requirements for abortion providers—including the patient’s state of residence and the pregnancy’s gestation—with SB 36.
In Oklahoma, Republicans will aim to establish the crime of “trafficking abortion-inducing drugs” by continuing to push for HB 1168. This so-called “trafficking” occurs when someone intentionally delivers abortion pills to someone who intends to use them.
In Tennessee, Republicans will again push for SB 419/HB 5, to allow people who send abortion pills into the state to face wrongful death lawsuits.
In Florida, Republicans are reintroducing SB 164, a bill to allow wrongful death actions to be brought on behalf of embryos, for a third time. We wrote about this bill earlier this month.
The fact that state legislatures aren’t even in session and these nightmarish bills are already on the docket presents an important reminder: Anti-abortion extremists are relentless. Attempting to overwhelm us is a strategy.
In the Courts
As we near the end of the first year of Trump’s second term, Planned Parenthood has a recap of six of Trump’s most dangerous judicial appointments—so far.
There’s Joshua Divine, now on the Eastern and Western District Courts of Missouri, who has falsely characterized birth control as “the equivalent of abortions.” His appointment further confirms the anti-abortion movement’s end goal of banning birth control.
Chad Meredith—recently confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky—shrugged off the extreme disruptiveness of his state’s abortion ban because patients “only” need to travel 150 miles out of state for care.
Then there’s Jordan Pratt, who’s set to join the federal bench in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Pratt, confirmed by the Senate just this week, helped overturn a decades-old law in the state that protected minors’ abortion access.
This small sampling of the extremists Trump is packing the courts with should make the stakes of the 2026 midterms clear: this could be Congressional Democrats’ last chance to block Trump’s judicial nominees and curb his administration’s radical anti-abortion agenda.
I find it amazing these slimy antis are celebrating some biased polling. Since WHEN do we poll the general public about what’s safe medication or how it should be prescribed?? It’s ridiculous!
On behalf of the rest of New England we apologize for New Hampshire. Half of them are former Massachusetts residents who wanted lower taxes. It's somewhat of a purple state but the redneck attitude is ever present. They are ruining our chances to be absorbed by Canada. I wish I was joking.