These Anti-Abortion Lies Defined 2024

An end-of-year reality check

“Gaslighting” may feel like an overused term, but there’s no better word to describe how Republicans handled abortion rights this year. Unwilling to admit that they’re passing wildly unpopular laws, Republicans spent 2024 insisting loudly and often that the horror unfolding in front of our eyes wasn’t really happening: That their bans were perfectly safe, that our lives hadn’t been fundamentally changed for the worse, and that they would never, ever hurt women—even as they openly fought for the right to deny us life-saving care.

Even as women died.

True to form, Republicans declared that the real problem wasn’t the suffering their policies inflicted—but the people pointing it out. If they can’t hide post-Roe horrors, they figure shirking blame and sowing confusion might do the trick.

Cutting through this manipulation doesn’t have to be difficult. Because for as much time, energy and money as the GOP has put into hiding what abortion bans have done to this country, even a brief look at the past year lays the truth bare.

Republicans’ claim that they gave abortion ‘back to the states’, for example—a deception that won them the presidency—came alongside unprecedented attempts to silence voters on the issue.

In Florida, GOP leaders launched an assault on the state’s pro-choice ballot measure using millions in taxpayer dollars—from a massive disinformation campaign and bogus ‘voter fraud’ investigation to threats of criminal charges against TV stations running Amendment 4 ads. The measure lost with 57% of the vote. Does any of that seem like the “will of the people” to you?

In state after state, Republicans revealed just how far they’d go to quash our voices: South Dakota voters who signed a petition to put abortion on the ballot got phone calls from anti-choice activists posing as officials from the Secretary of State’s office, pressuring them to remove their names. In Missouri, voters were targeted with texts claiming the signature-gatherers for an abortion rights amendment were actually trying to steal their identities. Nebraska conservatives didn’t bother with all that, instead collecting signatures for an amendment they told voters would protect abortion rights. In reality, it would—and did—codify the state’s 12-week ban.

If they’re so sure that America is a ‘pro-life’ nation, why did the GOP work so hard to ensure voters didn’t have a true say?

When they weren’t dismantling democracy, Republicans spent 2024 telling us that their jaw-droppingly extremist abortion policies were simply common sense restrictions. As if Americans didn’t watch Arizona’s Supreme Court rule in favor of an 1864 abortion ban adopted before women had the right to vote, Alabama declare that frozen embryos were “extrauterine children,” and South Carolina lawmakers introduce legislation (for the second time!) that would make abortion punishable by the death penalty.

The GOP reminded us every day that ‘back to the states’ really meant ‘back in time.’

Lest you think that South Carolina’s radical bill was an outlier, consider that Texas Republicans endorsed the death penalty for abortion patients in their platform—demanding that ending a pregnancy be treated as a homicide. All this, while telling Americans to our faces that they would never punish women for abortion. (That’s the thing about anti-abortion gaslighting; it assumes we’re quite fucking stupid.)

Conservatives’ penchant for punishment wasn’t theoretical or just words on a page—not for women like Brittany Watts. She started 2024 waiting to hear whether an Ohio grand jury would indict her for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after flushing her miscarriage. Amari Marsh, meanwhile, faced ‘murder by child abuse’ charges in South Carolina until August—prosecutors argued she failed to provide first aid to the fetus she lost at home.

Those are just the stories we heard about: Pregnancy Justice published a 2024 report revealing that more than 200 people faced pregnancy-related criminal charges in the first year after Roe was overturned. Imagine how many more people weren’t brought up on charges, but cruelly interrogated after suffering a traumatic pregnancy loss. In July, I reported on a Georgia woman who was questioned by police after having an early miscarriage. Think about the fear and humiliation she must have felt. Law enforcement even sent her fetal remains off for an ‘autopsy.’

Criminalization didn’t stop with patients. Desperate to punish ‘the helpers,’ Republicans also targeted providers, abortion funds—even everyday Americans. The year kicked off with lawmakers in Tennessee and Oklahoma proposing legislation that classified helping a teen obtain an abortion as ‘trafficking.’ These bills—which Tennessee has since enacted into law—don’t just criminalize taking a minor out of state for care; even offering gas money for the trip or sharing information about abortion could be labeled ‘trafficking.’

In keeping with 2024’s trademark trickery, conservatives insisted these laws weren’t radical attacks on free speech—but ‘parents’ rights’ policies. It’s a particularly absurd argument considering multiple counties in Texas passed similar local ordinances that don’t just target teens, but women of all ages. At least a federal appeals court saw the policies for what they were: Last month, part of Idaho’s ‘abortion trafficking’ law was struck down as a First Amendment violation.

We saw similar attacks on speech across the country this year. Idaho’s Attorney General, for example, fought for the right to prosecute doctors who give patients out-of-state abortion referrals, while Texas Republicans tried to pass a law that would make pro-choice websites illegal. (Even Abortion, Every Day would be banned.)

At the same time, anti-abortion activists flooded the courts with their own free speech lawsuits—arguing that buffer zones violated their First Amendment right to harass women up close and personal outside of clinics, and that laws preventing crisis pregnancy centers from lying about abortion ‘reversals’ were unconstitutional. In other words, they fought to protect extremists’ ability to lie to and harass women—all while telling Americans they were protecting women and offering ‘choices.’

That kind of blatant hypocrisy was common in 2024: Remember the Tennessee legislators who passed an ‘abortion trafficking’ law to supposedly protect children? Those same lawmakers voted to force raped children 12 years old and younger to carry pregnancies to term.

And while anti-abortion legislators and activists claimed their laws would prevent coerced or forced abortions, they ignored evidence showing that abortion bans actually empower abusers. One 2024 study found that pregnant women living in anti-abortion states were more likely to be killed by their abusive partners; states with abortion restrictions had a whopping 75% higher rate of peripartum homicide. It’s not a coincidence that calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline increased by 100% after Roe was overturned.

But if this year showed us anything, it’s that those who hammer on about the ‘sanctity of life’ rarely care about women’s. Nowhere was that clearer than conservatives’ concerted effort to hide data showing that abortion bans kill.

A 2024 analysis, for example, found that Texas’ maternal mortality rate soared by an incredible 56% after Republicans enacted a total abortion ban. You might expect that politicians who proudly call themselves ‘pro-life’ would demand an urgent investigation into the crisis. No such luck. In fact, Republicans had anticipated the increase and preemptively stacked the state’s maternal mortality board with a radical anti-abortion activist who denies that bans harm women.

What’s more, after ProPublica reported that Texas’ law had caused the deaths of three women, the committee announced it wouldn’t analyze data from the first two years of the ban at all.

Georgia Republicans also took a see-no-evil approach. After another ProPublica investigation linked the deaths of two women to the state’s ban, Republican leaders fired every single person on the state’s maternal mortality committee. Idaho’s GOP didn’t wait for such a problem; they disbanded the state’s maternal mortality committee in 2023.

But Republicans didn’t just hide or ignore women’s deaths—they went further, claiming it was actually abortion rights activists and pro-choice ‘misinformation’ endangering and killing women. One of the country’s most powerful anti-abortion organizations, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, launched a half million dollar ad campaign declaring that “Democrats’ abortion lies put women at risk” and that “the Left’s scare tactics are deadly.”

Republican politicians followed suit, insisting that their bans were perfectly safe and that pro-choicers had scared doctors out of providing legal care. Some, like Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti even argued that doctors were deliberately withholding health- and life-saving care from critically ill women in order to make a political point. Idaho’s Attorney General Raúl Labrador implied the same.

Labrador also told reporters that doctors were lying about having to fly women out-of-state for life-saving care. Incredibly, he said as much outside of the Supreme Court where he had just argued that Idaho should have the right to deny patients life-saving abortions.

These are the manipulations that truly defined abortion rights in 2024—the ones where Republicans insisted over and over that bans were safe and in women’s own best interest, even as the laws killed us.

What made these lies so much worse, of course, was just how many Americans believed them. There’s no getting around the fact that conservatives’ deception worked: Even if voters didn’t believe everything Republicans said on abortion, they believed enough to elect them.

That’s why I write about disinformation again and again: we can’t expose the truth just once and expect that Americans will hear it. If we want to break through, we need to reinforce reality every single day.

I don’t mean we have to hold people’s hands through it all; if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I don’t believe in talking to brick walls or wasting our activist energy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t repeat the truth often and everywhere.

Here’s that truth: These mostly-male lawmakers say they’re saving babies even as their states’ infant mortality rates spike; and they claim their states are safe, even as doctors flee. Because they can’t prove abortion is dangerous, they fabricate statistics. They mock feminist warnings about the threat to birth control as they restrict access to IUDs and emergency contraception. And they call themselves the party of family values as they force women to carry dead and dying fetuses, decimate maternal healthcare in rural communities, torture patients, and kill women.

As we enter into the new year, I expect we’ll see more anti-abortion distortions, cover-ups and gaslighting. The lies will likely be bolder, too: With the power to weaponize the federal government against abortion, the GOP will have to hide even more attacks from voters. That’s what Americans need to see—not just the truth, but the lies they tell to hide it.

No one likes to be fooled, and Republicans are making fools out of all of us.