The Rise of Abortion 'Abolitionists'

5.7.25

Click to skip ahead: Attacks on Abortion Pills reveals that yes, of course, everything happening right now is coordinated. Local Travel Bans looks at the eighth Texas county to outlaw helping women get out of state abortions. All Eyes on Extremism has a deep dive into the growing abortion ‘abolition’ movement. In the States, news from Indiana, Louisiana, and Missouri. Attacks on Democracy has the latest in efforts to quash ballot measures and voters’ voices.

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Attacks on Abortion Pills

It was only a week ago that I warned the anti-abortion movement was in cahoots with the FDA on a plan to restrict abortion medication: Just days after FDA chief Marty Makary said he would consider taking action on the pills if new data showed they were unsafe, a conservative think tank dropped a new study purporting to prove just that. Soon after, Republicans started calling for the federal agency to roll back access to mifepristone.

Today, POLITICO published an article making clear that this is all part of a coordinated plan of attack led by anti-abortion organizations, legislators and leaders. They’re calling it “Rolling Thunder,” which would be hilarious if these people weren’t so dangerous.

If you’ve been reading Abortion, Every Day’s coverage on the attacks against mifepristone, you won’t find anything super surprising in the piece—mostly just confirmation of what the newsletter has been warning about. (Yes, I’m still grumpy with POLITICO over their atrocious headlines yesterday claiming that the Trump administration is “defending” abortion pills.)

That said, there are a few interesting tidbits: To start, even the most radical anti-abortion activists admit this supposedly ‘groundbreaking’ research on mifepristone isn’t a real study! Dr. Christina Francis, president of the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs (AAPLOG), said the paper is “not a study in the traditional sense” and “not conclusive proof of anything.”

You know that shit is really fake when even the lady who doesn’t believe in life-saving abortions doesn’t want to get fully behind it!

The biggest takeaway for me, though, is just how orchestrated these attacks are. As Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said, “It’s awfully convenient that a few days after Marty Makary says that he had no plans to restrict mifepristone, but that he’d be open to considering new science, some new trash science just happens to land in his lab.”

One gripe: This POLITICO piece is the first major national coverage of the nonsense anti-abortion study, and instead of pointing out that it’s utter bunk, reporters defaulted to ‘both sides’ mode. Here’s what I mean:

“The paper, published last week, purports to show significantly more patients have experienced serious side effects after taking mifepristone than previously known. Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective.”

It’s not until paragraph fifteen that readers are told the research isn’t peer reviewed. And not until paragraph twenty-eight do we learn that the “serious adverse events” it counted weren’t actually serious—or even necessarily related to mifepristone.

I get journalistic objectivity, and I know mainstream reporters don’t have the freedom I do. But there has to be a better way.

Local Travel Bans

It’s been a minute since we’ve talked about the push to ban abortion-related travel at the local level. Longtime readers know all about “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn”—local ordinances designed to terrorize abortion patients and anyone who helps them.

Led by anti-abortion extremist Mark Lee Dickson, these laws don’t just declare abortion illegal within a town or county—they go further, banning so-called “aiding and abetting.” That means driving someone on county roads or even lending them gas money to leave the state for care could result in a civil suit.

Basically, these are de facto travel bans. The goal is to chill community support—scaring people out of helping one another—and making women too terrified to leave their state for care.

Sometimes Dickson and his ilk pass ordinances in pro-choice states—deliberately setting up a legal conflict they’re hoping will make it through the courts. (They want to get the Comstock Act in front of the Supreme Court.) But most of these ordinances are passing in places where abortion is already banned.

For example, Camp County, Texas just became the eighth county in the state to pass one of these local laws. The ordinance states that abortions are illegal, as is ‘aiding and abetting’ an abortion “regardless of the location of the abortion [and] regardless of the law in the jurisdiction where the abortion occurred.”

Just to take a step back a moment: we are talking about laws that make it illegal to help someone leave the state—ordinances that trap women in places where they’re not treated as full human beings.

Can you imagine the national outrage if towns across the country were passing laws to limit men’s right to travel?

But don’t give up hope—communities are fighting back and winning. If you haven’t read about what happened in Amarillo, Texas, check out this guest post from the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance:

How to Stop An ‘Abortion Trafficking’ Ordinance

All Eyes On Extremism

I hate giving these guys oxygen, truly—but we need to talk about abortion ‘abolitionists’. These mostly male extremists want to prosecute abortion patients as murderers—and they’re gaining political ground. What used to be fringe legislation is now getting co-sponsors, committee hearings, and Republican support. And while the GOP once claimed they’d never punish patients, now they say ‘equal protection’ bills “will inspire healthy dialogue.”

For fuck’s sake—some of these extremists are even getting elected to state legislatures.

That’s why I was so glad to see this sharp deep-dive from The American Prospect on the growing ‘abolition’ movement. It’s well worth a full read.

Reporter Colleen Scerpella includes a handy document listing all the ‘equal protection’ bills introduced this year—noting that the legislation often shares identical language. That means these bills are likely all coming from one group providing model legislation.

That tracks with what Abortion, Every Day reported back in January: This new stream of bills is all coming from the Foundation to Abolish Abortion and its leader, Bradley Pierce. (Pierce was also the driving force behind Texas Republicans changing their platform to call for ‘equal protection’ laws—which could mean the death penalty for abortion patients.)

Not that the idea of killing women gives these guys pause. One abolitionist leader, Jeff Durbin, was caught on leaked audio saying: “If you take the life of a human being…you forfeit your right to live.”

There are two things I’m especially worried about here. First, these people are a lot closer to mainstream political power than most folks think. One of FAA’s top legislative liaisons is John Rice-Cameron—the son of Susan Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security advisor and U.N. ambassador.

Second, they’re incredibly organized. Scerpella reports that FAA is using a “precinct strategy” to burrow into local Republican parties:

“This ‘ground-up’ approach enables abolition activists to infiltrate state and county Republican parties, effectively making their extremist position more acceptable within the broader party by suppressing more moderate voices.”

In a 2024 speech, Rice-Cameron encouraged supporters to give local candidates time and money in the early stages of their careers—before they take office—in order to get their hooks in early.

And while the mainstream anti-abortion movement loves to insist they don’t want to punish patients, let’s not pretend there’s much real distance between them and ‘abolitionists’. Just a few weeks ago, Kristan Hawkins—president of Students for Life—flat out admitted that “the vast majority” of anti-abortion leaders do want to punish patients. They’re just waiting until it’s politically safe to say so.

All of which is to say: These aren’t political outliers anymore, and we can’t afford to treat them as such.

In the States

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is downright obsessed with getting women’s abortion records. I’ve been tracking this story for a while—so if you need a refresher, click here, here, and here. The short version is that the Republican attorney general wants individual abortion reports to be public records in the same way birth and death certificates are. He’s been in a legal battle with the state department of health, which (correctly) argues releasing those records would violate patient privacy.

Why does Rokita want people’s abortion reports to be publicly-available? The idea is to allow anti-abortion activists to scour through the records, looking for evidence of ‘wrongdoing’ that they can then send to the AG so he can bring charges.

Thanks to a suit filed by OBGYNs Dr. Caitlin Bernard and Dr. Caroline Rouse, a judge blocked the health department from publishing individual abortion reports a little over a month ago. But Rokita is still at it—he’s appealing the ruling and wants the judge to release the records while the issue is battled out in the courts.

This isn’t just something happening in Indiana, by the way: What Rokita is doing is part of a broader national strategy by anti-abortion activists and lawmakers who want to weaponize abortion reports and data. In Ohio, for example, Republicans are pushing to expand the kind of information collected on abortion patients and then make that information public. In fact, they want to publish a publicly-available “electronic dashboard” that people could search through.

In addition to making it easier to criminalize providers and patients, the goal is to shame patients and create a chilling effect: you might be less likely to seek out an abortion if you know the state is collecting and publishing your data.

Meanwhile, Louisiana Republicans are advancing legislation that they say would require schools to offer support and resources to pregnant students. Sounds great, right? Until you read the fine print. Abortion rights activists in the state point out that HB 478 opens the door to sending students off to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers—groups that don’t offer real medical services, just religious ideology.

Here’s what Michelle Erenberg, executive director of Lift Louisiana, said at a committee hearing for the bill a few days ago:

“Public educational institutions have a constitutional obligation to remain neutral in matters of deeply personal and political significance. Requiring schools to promote the viewpoints of nonmedical, religiously motivated organizations threatens this neutrality and exposes institutions to potential legal challenges.”

Finally, The New Republic has a really good piece about the new lawsuit seeking to end forced parental involvement in Missouri abortions. I told you about this suit last week: youth-focused abortion access organization Right By You (RBY) is using Missouri’s Amendment 3 to ask the courts to end parental notification and consent laws in the state.

As executive director Stephanie Kraft Sheley said in a statement at the time, “These laws don’t protect youth—they are designed to punish those already in vulnerable situations.”

TNR goes into detail about what getting an abortion might look like for a young person, especially if they live in a state where they’re forced to get a judicial bypass to forgo parental involvement. Kraft Sheley calls it a “humiliation ritual.” Which sounds about right: remember the judge who chastised a Florida teen, denying her an abortion because she had poor grades? Nightmare shit.

Quick hits:

• Arkansas just upped their funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers;

• A Pennsylvania bill would remove waiting period and counseling mandates for abortions;

• A new poll reminds us that Florida voters don’t want abortion banned;

• And Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to include links to adoption services on their websites.

“To build a future where abortion is truly accessible, we must prioritize economic justice, invest in the infrastructure that supports patients on the move, and center the people most impacted by bans and barriers. That means investing in in-clinic care and virtual care. It means Medicaid and mutual aid. Anything less risks reinforcing the very inequities we’re trying to dismantle.”

- Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder & CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, TIME magazine

Attacks on Democracy

Okay, let’s talk about what Republicans are up to on ballot measures—namely, how they’re trying to make sure that voters can’t use citizen-led initiatives to restore abortion access of any kind.

You all know that anti-abortion legislators and activists have been chipping away at democracy ever since Roe was overturned: we’ve seen it in every single state where abortion was on the ballot, or where voters tried to get the issue on the ballot.

In Ohio, Republican leaders colluded with anti-abortion activists to write a biased ballot summary. Missouri Republicans stalled signature gathering for a pro-choice amendment and even sued to keep abortion off the ballot. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened television stations that ran ads for a pro-choice ballot measure and launched a bogus voter fraud investigation and disinformation campaign (funded with taxpayer dollars). In Nebraska, conservatives tricked voters out of supporting abortion rights by starting their own ballot measure to ban abortion using a near-identical name as the pro-choice campaign. South Dakota antis pretended to be from the Secretary of State’s office in order to pressure voters into removing their names from a pro-choice petition. And in Arkansas, they stopped the issue from getting on the ballot at all.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Even though November is over and done with, Republicans aren’t done yet. They’re trying to make sure that voters will never have a chance again to make their voices heard on abortion rights. Why? Because they know that Americans are overwhelmingly pro-choice, even in red states. And legislators obsessed with controlling our bodies and freedom don’t want to take the risk.

In Florida, for example, Republicans are pushing through new restrictions on citizen-led initiatives. They want signature-gatherers to collect all sorts of personal information from those signing petitions (like a driver’s license), limit how many signatures canvassers can collect, and force petitioners to submit signatures within just a few days.

I suppose this is better than what DeSantis originally proposed: He wanted to eliminate canvassers entirely, instead forcing voters to go sign a petition in person at their local Supervisor of Elections (SOE) office.

The Republican governor is pretending that this is about voter fraud, but we know what’s really going on here: With nearly 60% of the vote, Florida’s pro-choice amendment got too close for comfort.

The New York Times reports that Arkansas Republicans are trying something similar: adding onerous requirements to the ballot measure process in an effort to quash citizen-led initiatives. They want signature gatherers to collect photo ID from signers, for example, and mandate that canvassers are permanent residents of the state.

Then, of course, there’s Missouri. In one of the most clear-cut attack on the will of voters, Republicans in the state have been doing anything they can to stop Amendment 3 from being fully enacted. The state GOP now insists that voters didn’t really understand what they were signing up for, and they want to put abortion back on the ballot—this time, to get people to agree to an abortion ban.

Unsurprisingly, the same folks trying to bring back the state’s abortion ban also plan on weaponizing anti-trans bigotry. Check out this quote from Brian Westbrook, the executive director of Coalition Life:

“Voters should have another chance. From my conversations with lawmakers, I think primarily it’s going to be related to the abortion discussion, but the transgender discussion is certainly in this dialogue.”

Charming. I won’t even get into what’s happening with the Missouri Attorney General—you can catch up on that one yourself.

Some of the local activists I’ve spoken to in Missouri aren’t just furious at Republicans, though. Quite a few have said they feel like mainstream reproductive rights groups didn’t have a plan for the inevitable fight conservative lawmakers would put up after Amendment 3 was passed. As a result, much of the state’s abortion rights resources are being directed to the legal battle around getting the amendment enforced—rather than towards patients themselves.

Still, there’s no doubt that Republicans are showing exactly who they are in every state: they know that voters want abortion to be legal and they simply don’t care.