The Week in Abortion
1.27.25 - 1.31.25
Attacks on Data & Documents
Let’s start with the most recent news: In response to the Trump administration scrubbing data from the CDC and other government websites, Abortion, Every Day launched CDCGuidelines.com. There, I’m collecting as many documents as I can about reproductive and sexual health, contraception, LGBTQIA and youth issues, domestic violence, and more.
The website is a work in progress and we’re prioritizing documents that have already been removed from .gov sites—though we’re also uploading any we believe are in danger of being deleted.
If you have a document you’ve saved or if there’s something vital you think we should look for to download, please email tips@abortioneveryday.com
Since we launched the site, the Trump administration has deleted even more pages and documents—some of which give clues as to what policies they plan to attack next. I’ll report more on that tomorrow. In the meantime, check out what the CDC page on sexual violence prevention looks like below. Good times!
Attacks on Abortion Providers
One of the biggest stories Abortion, Every Day covered this week dropped on Friday: Louisiana brought the first post-Dobbs criminal charges against an abortion provider. Dr. Maggie Carpenter was indicted on criminal abortion charges after shipping medication to a Louisiana teen. Carpenter was also the target of a civil suit last month brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The Louisiana district attorney also charged and arrested the teen’s mother, who they claim coerced her into having an abortion. (Abortion ‘coercion’ is a tactic I started warning about in 2023, and has only grown since.)
The broader context: Republican donors and activists have been seeking a criminal case they hope to bring to the Supreme Court. Attorney General Liz Murrill clearly thinks she found a winner: It involves a teenager, allegations of ‘coercion,’ and a potentially unsympathetic defendant in the mother.
Read more below, and please donate to Dr. Carpenter’s organization, the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, here.
Attacks on Abortion Clinics
Republicans didn’t just attack abortion providers this week: The White House and Republicans moved to give anti-abortion extremists free rein to attack clinics. The short version:
Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen violent activists for their roles in attacking abortion clinics.
Trump and JD Vance told an audience at the March for Life that anyone who harasses patients or attacks clinics will “never have the government go after them ever again.”
Dozens of Republican lawmakers held a private meeting with anti-abortion activists where they pledged to repeal the FACE Act—the federal law that prohibits blocking or doing violence to a reproductive health clinic.
The Department of Justice announced that they won’t enforce the FACE Act unless there are “extraordinary circumstances...such as death.”
In the background, conservative legal groups are working to overturn Hill v. Colorado—the Supreme Court decision that established abortion clinic buffer zones.
The idea, of course, is to make it as easy as possible to attack providers and patients—and to give anti-abortion activists what they like most: the ability to humiliate and shame women. Read the full story:
Legislation Watch
I dug into Republican fetal personhood bill HR 722 this week, explaining what you have to worry about and what you don’t: You don’t have to worry that it will pass (yet) but you do have to worry about the ‘equal protection’ language.
In fact, the other legislation news this week was that Texas Republicans introduced an ‘equal protection’ bill that would make having an abortion a homicide—punishable by the death penalty in Texas. It’s not expected to pass, but it’s clear that extremism is becoming more mainstream.
Finally, as Abortion, Every Day predicted just days earlier, Students for Life launched a multi-state legislation blitz using their false claim that abortion medication and fetal remains are poisoning the groundwater. The group is working with Republicans in Wyoming, Arizona, Maine, Idaho, and West Virginia on supposed “Clean Water For All” bills.
They don’t give a shit about the environment, of course, but they do know it polls well. Students for Life and Republican legislators also really love the idea of humiliating and punishing women—especially those who are able to escape clinic protesters by self-managing their abortions at home. That’s why these bills would mandate that abortion patients bag up their blood as medical waste and bring it back to their doctor for ‘proper’ disposal. Vile.
State News
A devastating investigation from Taylor Goldenstein at the Houston Chronicle shows that at least six children 11 years old and under were forced to leave Texas for abortion care in 2023. In fact, in the year after Roe was overturned, over 100 Texas children had to travel for abortions.
In North Dakota, the state’s ban won’t be enforced while a legal challenge makes its way through the courts.
Wyoming Republicans are pushing legislation that would force women seeking abortion medication to get a medically unnecessary ultrasound.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds spoke at the state’s March for Life, claiming that Trump’s election was proof that voters are anti-abortion. The truth? 60% of Iowa voters want abortion to be legal and 81% of Americans don’t want the government involved in abortion at all.
Finally, the Republican candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was caught on tape admitting that he’s already made up his mind on abortion. (Make sure to read more about that one, it’s a big deal.)
RFK Confirmation
Abortion, Every Day covered RFK’s confirmation shit show this week, reporting that Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services actually revealed quite a lot about how the administration plans to attack abortion rights.
Kennedy dropped hints not just about mifepristone—which he said Trump wants him to “study” the safety of—but abortion ‘complication’ reporting, emergency abortions, and the possibility of a national ban. I spent the most time writing about that last bit, because it’s the clue other outlets didn’t seem to pick up on.
Check out clips of Democratic Senators blasting Kennedy for his flip-flopping on abortion rights and general cowardice, and read my full reporting:
Project 2025 Checklist
Trump’s new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, made a splashy addition to our Project 2025 checklist this week, directing staff to prioritize funding for “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Full story here and checklist below:
Reinstate the global gag rule ✔️
Enforce the Hyde Amendment ✔️
Repeal the FACE Act 〰️
Diverting $ to ‘marriage promotion’ programs ✔️
Expand & enforce ‘conscience’ laws ✔️
✔️ = they did it
〰️ = they’re trying to do it
In Better News
It’s a small thing, but it’s important! There’s a lot of new and interesting information in this report from polling group PerryUndem, but it’s these two things that put a little pep in my step: Most Trump voters don’t want him to restrict abortion, and anti-abortion groups are very unpopular—even among Trump voters.
I don’t know that we’ve found the best way to capitalize on that knowledge, but reports like this one give us a good sense of where we might want to put our focus and energy. (Especially when we’re stretched so thin.)
The most likely explanation for the deletions is still the requirement that references to gender are replaced by references to biological sex across the government, which is not quite as straightforward as it would seem. Presumably that is the executive order being referred to, although with the rate and scope that they're issuing them, one can never be sure. The indispensable Chris Geidner at Law Dork had a post on this.
That said, the purpose of defining transgender people out of existence is to make it easier to insist on rigid sex roles as just some kind of reality of the species. (Note that when any of these people use the word 'natural', you should always be translating it in your mind to 'biblical', because that's what they mean. Andra Watkins is an expert on Christian Nationalism and has a substack on this). So, yes, in the end result they are coming for all women.
If new versions of these government documents do resurface, it will be instructive to compare with the old ones to see exactly what and how they've changed.
Certiorari was granted Dec. 18, 2024 in Medina v. Planned Parenthood about whether state Medicaid programs will be allowed to exclude health care providers from their Medicaid program because of the other services (e.g., abortion) the providers furnish. I bet you can guess how I think the Supreme Court will rule. The upshot would be that Medicaid beneficiaries who get family planning services from a particular provider (typically, Planned Parenthood) might not be able to get Medicaid coverage for those visits. And if Planned Parenthood can't get Medicaid funding, it'll be in ever more financial trouble than it is now. See Kian Azimpoor, "The Supreme Court Puts Access to Medicaid Family Planning Care on the Line," healthaffairs.org (Feb. 2 2025), https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/supreme-court-puts-a[...].