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Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup. Every Monday, we’ll send you a summary of the biggest stories about bodily autonomy. We’ll also include links to pieces that Garnet or Susan have published.
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Let’s dive in.
On Autonomy News
A constitutional amendment in Missouri would not only reimpose an abortion ban, it would also prohibit youth gender-affirming care—which is already illegal in the state. Conservatives are leaning into the trans ban, but the coalition urging people to vote “no” on Amendment 3 isn’t saying much about the issue. It’s been largely left to the state’s biggest LGBTQ+ organization, PROMO, to humanize trans people. Assigned Media went canvassing with PROMO and we’re proud to republish this on-the-ground report. (Share this story on Bluesky.)
Evan Urquhart
Last year, an executive at Students for Life said that, when it comes to restricting abortion pills, "I’m for using the devil’s own tools against them." About that: A Texas woman forced to give birth has now sued several members of the organization under a law it lobbied for. HB 7 lets people seek bounties of at least $100,000 from those who distribute abortion pills, or intend to do so. The group pushed the legislature to enact the law last year and declared “victory” when it passed. Following a stunt where CEO Kristan Hawkins and three other workers attempted to order abortion pills online and bragged about it on social media, they’re being sued for $459,782—the average cost to raise two kids in Texas until age 18. (Share this story on Instagram, Bluesky, or TikTok.)
Susan Rinkunas
Remember when we reported that the Trump administration gave nearly $9 million in family planning funds to organizations run by anti-abortion doctors? We’ve since learned of an additional $3.9 million grant, which brings the total to nearly $13 million. This new grant will fund the development of a “body literacy” education program, and be overseen by a doctor who recently said girls should think about future pregnancies as young as 8 years old. (Share this story on Instagram, Bluesky, or TikTok.)
Garnet Henderson
Federal news
President Trump signed an executive order today that his administration claims will “enhance, streamline, and elevate” federal efforts to improve women’s health “in all phases of life.” The order directs the National Institutes of Health to establish a Women’s Health Division, and creates a Women’s Health Task Force to be co-chaired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. It also formally revokes several similar actions taken by the Biden administration and comes with no funding, simply directing the Department of Health and Human Services to figure out how to pay for it. Dorianne Mason, senior director of health equity and contraceptive access at National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement, “Women’s health has long been ignored as a federal priority, and while we agree that steps must be taken to close disparities in women’s health care, it’s hard not to point out the blatant hypocrisy of this unfunded order coming from an administration that is actively decimating health care access for women.” Mason also pointed out that this entire initiative is ironic, given the administration’s previous insistence that any programs focused on women were “illegal DEI.”
Katie Zacharia—Trump’s latest White House Press Secretary who served on the board of an abortion “abolitionist” group that advocates jailing people who have abortions—couldn’t hack it. After a disastrous first press briefing and the revelation that she’d been calling herself a lawyer despite failing the bar exam, Trump gave her the boot. Katie, we hardly knew ya.
In its recent court filing providing an update on its politicized safety “review” of the abortion drug mifepristone, the Food and Drug Administration said one of the approaches it was using was a TreeScan analysis. The agency said it would analyze a large safety database using TreeScan software, “to discover unknown safety concerns (if any) contained in the data regarding the use of mifepristone through 70 days gestation,” or 10 weeks of pregnancy. As it turns out, TreeScan was developed by Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician infamous for his opposition to the Covid vaccine and other pandemic precautions. What could go wrong?
Speaking of medication abortion, Senate Democrats urged the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol from a list of contaminants that the EPA will test for in a drinking water study. The campaign to get the EPA to add them to the list was led by… drumroll please… Students for Life.
Nearly $90 million in funds from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program—almost the program’s entire $100 million grant budget—have been awarded to Guidehouse, a consulting firm with direct ties to HHS officials. NPR reports that Cody Inman, who currently serves as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, the HHS division that oversees TPPP, used to work at Guidehouse, as did at least two other HHS officials. TPPP is one of the reproductive health programs that the Trump administration refocused to emphasize childbearing rather than contraception. The money is supposed to go to local organizations.
State news
Anti-abortion groups attempting to block implementation of the Massachusetts law that repeals the state’s ban on abortions after 24 weeks told a religious news outlet they’re “very confident” they can get enough signatures to stop it from going into effect. However, they didn’t share how many signatures they’ve actually collected. They need nearly 50,000 to block the law immediately and get it onto the 2028 ballot for voters to affirm or reject. If they get just over 37,000 signatures, the law will go into effect, but will still appear on the 2028 ballot. Governor Maura Healey could add an emergency clause to force the law into effect, but she won’t commit to doing so.
In August, a Kansas judge struck down the Woman’s Right to Know Act, a behemoth “informed consent” law that applied to abortion and no other medical procedures. The state has spent nearly $1 million defending the policy, and is now requesting a new trial, apparently determined to spend even more. The law required abortion providers to give patients medically inaccurate “counseling” materials that falsely claimed abortion can cause breast cancer and infertility; imposed a 24-hour waiting period following this “counseling;” and forced an additional 30-minute delay between a required ultrasound and the actual abortion. Recent updates would have forced providers to tell patients about unproven and potentially dangerous abortion pill “reversal” treatments at least five times, and required them to ask a patient’s reason for seeking an abortion. Christian nationalist law firm Alliance Defending Freedom stepped in to help represent the state, which Garnet reported on at the time.
One rural Oklahoma hospital is bringing back maternity care for the first time since 2015. Only 27 percent of the state’s rural hospitals offer such care. The hospital got some funding from Trump’s Rural Health Transformation Program—but with Medicaid cuts looming, it’s not clear whether that will be enough to make the program sustainable.
Also in Oklahoma, Republicans are considering giving a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to businesses that donate to anti-abortion nonprofits. This is inspired by a similar program in Texas.
Former University of Kentucky athlete Laken Snelling was sentenced to ten years in prison in connection with the human remains found in her home. Snelling had pled guilty this summer to charges of first-degree manslaughter, abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, and concealing a birth. At the time of her guilty plea, Snelling said she went into labor unexpectedly. She previously told police that she passed out shortly after giving birth.
Elections
Idaho voters are considering an initiative that would overturn the state’s abortion ban. The ban was written by a lobbyist named David Ripley, who has a daughter he’s never acknowledged. She’s urging people to vote yes on Proposition 1 to end the prohibition on abortion. “As a child, I remember hiding in a bathroom with a phone nearby, ready to call 911 if things got worse. I remember him going to jail over unpaid child support,” Whitney Montgomery writes. “You do not have to agree with me about everything to believe that those decisions belong to women, their families and their doctors, not to politicians or lobbyists like my father.”
Transgender people in Kansas could deal with confusion over voting in the first election since a law took effect that invalidated thousands of their drivers licenses. But election officers are not responsible for enforcing the law regarding either voting or running for office. A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office said “gender discrepancies can never be a basis for denying anyone the right to vote.”
A new dark money group gave $2.9 million to the Missouri campaign supporting the aforementioned Amendment 3, which would ban abortion and transgender youth healthcare. The deceptively named Her Health, Her Future PAC is the campaign supporting the amendment and the new group, called Her Health Her Future Missouri, just doubled its cash on hand. Campaign manager James Lawson said the non-profit was necessary to support anonymous gifts, so anti-abortion supporters could donate “without putting a target on their backs.” Lawson is the deputy chief of staff for Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, but is on leave from that role so he can try to ban abortion.
Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri AG and former co-deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recently created a PAC called Vote Yes on Amendment 3. Bailey serves as the treasurer of the group, which is connected to Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. The PAC’s spokesperson is Hawley's former chief of staff, Kyle Plotkin, who said its first ad buy was seven figures, so at least $1 million. Hawley shared the ad on X. Plotkin told the Kansas City Star, "Josh and Erin Hawley support the effort. Josh wants to do everything he can to pass the amendment."
The Republican nominee for Minnesota Senate is, somehow, former NFL reporter Michele Tafoya, and she’s claiming to be “pro-choice.” But Tafoya has a long history of supporting abortion bans after the first trimester and said she’d vote to confirm conservative judges to lifetime seats. Words mean things, Michele.
On the ballot next month in Seminole, Texas, is an ordinance to ban abortion within city limits. The City Council unanimously rejected the “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” proposal in August, but moved to set up a special election. These ordinances are the project of activist Mark Lee Dickson and attorney Jonathan Mitchell—and they’re a Trojan Horse for reviving the 19th-century Comstock Act.
Head’s up, Ohio: In addition to races for Senate and Governor, there is also a state Supreme Court contest. Justice Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, is up for reelection and if she were to lose, the court would become “a unanimous conservative bench—one that will likely determine the outcome of high-profile cases related to both abortion access and gender-affirming care.”
Personhood watch
An Arizona judge awarded $67,000 in damages to a man who sued for wrongful death of an embryo after his ex-wife had a wanted abortion. In 2018, Mario Villegas accompanied his then-wife to appointments for a medication abortion she had at eight weeks’ gestation; they divorced later that year. In 2020, he filed a lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors, claiming that they didn’t follow the state’s informed consent law. The woman signed four consent documents, per ProPublica, but Villegas argued that her clinicians didn’t tell her about alternatives to abortion or the loss of “maternal-fetal” attachment. The Lawyering Project, which represents the clinic, wrote on its site that if the lawsuit is successful, “it would establish a dangerous precedent in Arizona concerning embryonic personhood and chill the provision of abortion care.” We’ve reached out to The Lawyering Project to see if they’ve filed an appeal or plan to do so. An anti-abortion attorney who recently negotiated a settlement on behalf of a woman who said she didn’t get proper informed consent told Live Action that the award “helps build a compelling case for personhood."
An Alabama mother died in jail a few days after giving birth. Jakeisa Knox, 29, had been in custody since the June death of her 9-month-old son. Knox, his sole caregiver, left her son unsupervised to go to work and returned home to find him dead. Initial reporting did not mention that Knox was six months pregnant at the time of her arrest and, when asking the judge to deny bond, prosecutors claimed she was a danger to herself and the fetus. Knox was transported to a hospital to deliver her baby and a person close to her family said she died days after returning to the jail, where she complained of chest pains.
A Michigan judge is letting a random guy provide a burial and a headstone for unidentified fetal remains found at a June music festival. He wasn’t the only random guy who volunteered to do so: The judge held a hearing with both of them and appointed one the “special fiduciary.”
First Amendment watch
In August, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Indiana law which made it a crime to refer minors out of state for abortion care violated the First Amendment right to free speech. The state is now asking the court to reconsider its decision. As of now, the policy remains blocked—but if the state is invested in continuing to defend the law, it will likely end up before the Supreme Court eventually.
Assaults on queer people
A few weeks ago, we reported that telehealth gender-affirming care provider QueerDoc asked for a rehearing before a larger panel of judges at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This request came after a three-judge panel sided with the Trump administration, blocking a lower court’s order that protected QueerDoc against a Department of Justice subpoena. A group of 20 states and Washington, D.C., 17 medical and health organizations, and Seattle Children’s Hospital all filed briefs in support of QueerDoc’s request. A response from the DOJ is due tomorrow.
Extremism
Rumi, the baby at the center of the high-profile, multistate battle over surrogacy, is back in California, where his parents had planned to care for him before surrogate McKenna West absconded to Texas and gave birth there. They’re asking a California judge to close out their custody dispute with West, who has been fighting for parental rights ever since she gave birth. Previously, West ran all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to stop Rumi’s parents from transferring him to California, even though his Texas doctor supported the move. West’s emergency appeal was denied, allowing a Texas court’s decision to defer to a California court to stand.
Campus police at the University of South Florida arrested an abortion “abolitionist” student after he showed up to a school event and refused to leave when he was told organizers didn’t want him there. Now he’s suing the school, represented by the Center for American Liberty, the firm founded by current Trump DOJ official Harmeet Dhillon.
Quick hits
- As we’ve been covering, Planned Parenthood officially returned to Louisiana last week with the reopening of its New Orleans clinic under a different regional affiliate.
- A randomized trial of medication abortion patients found that an FDA-required form for mifepristone did not improve people’s understanding of their care, suggesting that standard counseling is adequate and the additional form may not be needed.
- Another study shows that giving pregnant people “labor guides” that outline all the various medical interventions that could happen during birth helps them feel more in control, and makes them less susceptible to misinformation.
- One woman’s “nightmare” story of being in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention while pregnant, including “raw chicken, malnutrition, and fear.”
Palate cleanser
'Tis the season for evil walks.
@rithims 10,000 steps of 😈 a week bro 😂 #halloween #evilwalk #hotgirlwalk ♬ original sound - mommy
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