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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
Last week was our first anniversary and we published two very Autonomy News stories to mark the occasion:
In April, Garnet reported that artificial intelligence had emerged as a sticking point in contract negotiations between management and the workers of the National Abortion Hotline, the country’s largest abortion fund and support service. The workers’ union is asking that management agree to bargain with them before implementing any AI technology that would result in layoffs, but they say bosses walked away from the bargaining table. This led the union to file an unfair labor practice charge—an official allegation that an employer has violated federal labor law—and go on a 24-hour strike. Read Garnet’s latest story to learn more about the dispute and its implications for the abortion access landscape. (Share this story on Instagram, Bluesky, or TikTok.)
Garnet Henderson
Susan reported on the latest twist in a lawsuit filed by activist attorney Jonathan Mitchell. Mitchell is part of a coalition trying to ban abortion pills nationwide and has represented male abusers suing over their exes' alleged abortions. He found a woman plaintiff last year, but she's accused of fabricating an abortion coercion story and, now, of hiding text messages and a second phone from the defense. Mitchell, who cooked up the Texas 6-week ban that largely outlawed abortion months before Dobbs, wants to use the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills—if not all abortions. His female client’s lawsuit against a Marine Corps pilot cites the “zombie” law. (Share this story on Instagram, Bluesky, or TikTok.)
Susan Rinkunas
Federal news
After months of back-and-forth, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Food and Drug Administration is moving forward with its unnecessary, politicized “review” of the abortion drug mifepristone’s safety. Knowing how wildly unpopular abortion restrictions are, Trump had seemed set on avoiding the issue as much as possible until after the midterm elections. But anti-abortion groups had become increasingly vocal in their frustration with the administration, and according to WSJ, the decision to move forward with the “study” came after meetings between these groups and the administration. It was also prompted by an October deadline set by the trial court judge in the Louisiana v. FDA lawsuit. Still, the effort will take about six months, meaning it likely won’t be complete before the midterms. (Media note: The WSJ reporter with this exclusive, Liz Essley Whyte, is the same one to whom Alliance Defending Freedom gave advance notice of its 2022 lawsuit over mifepristone.)
In related news, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas tried and failed to force a vote to end telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone. Roy sought to add the proposal as an amendment to a spending bill to fund the FDA, but the House Rules committee did not adopt it.
Speaking of the spending bill, the House passed it and it includes a grab bag of horrible things: “defunding” large abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, banning funds for hospitals that provide postgraduate abortion training, and restricting insurance coverage of gender-affirming care. It would also reduce funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program, commonly known as WIC. Under this bill, monthly fruit and vegetable benefits for breastfeeding parents would be reduced from $52 to $13, and from $26 to $10 for kids. Maryland Rep. Andy Harris claimed that WIC remains fully funded, and that utilization of the program has decreased. Advocates point out that the data Harris is using to support this claim reflects only one quarter of last year, during which there was a government shutdown that led to confusion over which government programs were still up and running. According to the National WIC Association, utilization of the program is actually on the rise. Four House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass the bill.
A group of 41 Senators and 118 members of Congress wrote a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking him to reinstate a rule from Trump’s first term that largely excluded abortion providers from the Title X family planning program. Title X pays for things like birth control and STI screening and funds can represent a large part of abortion clinics’ budgets. The letter is backed by major anti-abortion groups including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, National Right to Life, and Students for Life Action. But as we’ve previously reported, the Trump administration proposed a budget for the Department of Health and Human Services that would effectively eliminate the program altogether, making this bit of political bluster potentially moot.
Ostensibly “pro-choice” Republican Senator Susan Collins voted to confirm Katie Lane, an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ Trump nominee, to a federal judgeship in Montana. Lane, who most recently worked as a lawyer for the Republican National Committee, has only nine years of legal experience, making her green even for a Trump nominee. For Collins, this is at least her ninth vote to confirm an anti-abortion Trump judge during his second term, including fetal personhood fan Joshua Dunlap, who now sits on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers her home state of Maine.
A federal trial begins this week in the case of an Idaho physician challenging the state’s abortion ban. Dr. Stacy Seyb sued the Idaho medical board in 2024, claiming the abortion ban violates the U.S. Constitution because it criminalizes providing abortions necessary for medical reasons. Seyb, who treats patients with high-risk pregnancies, is seeking to block enforcement of the law for medically indicated abortions—not trying to overturn the law entirely. Attorney General Raúl Labrador tried and failed to have the case dismissed.
State news
Late last year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed the Health Information Privacy Act, which would have ensured that the kind of electronic health data collected by health apps, period trackers, and wearable devices couldn’t be shared without a user’s consent. State lawmakers didn’t appreciate that: They’ve passed a slightly revised version this legislative session, known as S9269/A10357. Advocates are calling on Hochul to sign it.
New York State legislators also passed S2667/A1670, a bill that prohibits the use of restraints on pregnant and postpartum people in settings like courthouses, jails, and hospitals. The horrific story of a woman who was forced to give birth in handcuffs in a Brooklyn courtroom likely spurred the passage of the bill, which also awaits Hochul’s signature. Unfortunately, the Maternal Health, Dignity, and Consent Act—which would ban drug testing pregnant people without their consent—passed the Senate, but died in committee in the Assembly, so it won’t be enacted this year. “Contrary to racist myths perpetuated by the War on Drugs, drug testing pregnant people is not medically beneficial or recommended and can be extremely harmful,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The failure to pass the Maternal Health, Dignity, and Consent Act through both chambers is a serious and disappointing missed opportunity.”
An Illinois bill that would remove testosterone from the state’s prescription drug monitoring program—and prevent medication abortion drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol, as well as other hormones like estrogen, from being added in the future—has passed both chambers of the state legislature. Such programs are designed to monitor prescriptions of potentially habit-forming controlled substances, but experts have long pointed out that there is no medical or scientific reason testosterone should be regulated this way, and that increased surveillance of people taking testosterone poses a risk to transgender people. HB 4834 would also require the state to purge its existing patient records related to testosterone; it awaits Governor JB Pritzker’s signature.
In Ohio, not only are there two lawsuits seeking to roll back the 2023 constitutional amendment that enshrined a right to abortion until fetal viability, a conservative group is trying to put a repeal measure on the November ballot. The group titled its proposed amendment “Reproductive Healthcare and Legislative Authority Over Abortion,” but the Attorney General’s office rejected the group’s first attempt at a ballot summary because it could mislead voters. Outgoing AG Dave Yost wrote, “According to the summary, the proposed amendment would enshrine a static definition of abortion that is found in the Ohio Revised Code today. In reality, the proposed amendment gives the General Assembly much broader authority to define and regulate abortion.”
A state court judge in Florida recently declined to dismiss a lawsuit that Attorney General James Uthmeier filed against the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliate over what his office says are misleading claims that mifepristone is safer than Tylenol. (It is safer, James.) A similar case filed under a consumer protection statute is ongoing in Missouri.
Elections
A Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, billionaire Rick Jackson, agreed with someone at an April event who said rape survivors should need to “prove” they were assaulted before accessing an abortion under the exception to the state’s six-week ban. When a community member told Jackson she wanted to see “babies born no matter how they were conceived,” referring to rape, he responded: “You still got life, it’s still a life.” Jackson also said he wanted to “tighten up” the availability of abortion pills, which Georgians are accessing under telemedicine “shield” laws as well as in clinics.
The extremely vulnerable Republican Representative Mike Lawler (NY-17)—who voted to “defund” Planned Parenthood last year—thought it was a good idea to appear at an event for an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center.
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Personhood watch
A top Republican in North Carolina dismissed a fetal personhood bill that would allow murder charges against abortion providers, saying it “doesn’t have any chance” at advancing. House Bill 1232 would put a constitutional amendment on the ballot defining life as beginning at fertilization and allowing “deadly force” to prevent someone else from taking a life. The bill lost one of its two sponsors after it went viral. House Speaker Destin Hall told reporters last week, “I don’t think there’s literally any member of our caucus who wants it to move. Representative [Keith] Kidwell might, but no, it’s not going to move, it’s not a serious bill.”
An Illinois man accused of inserting four abortion pills into his pregnant girlfriend without her consent, causing a miscarriage, plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child and was sentenced to seven years in prison. In addition to the voluntary manslaughter charge, the man initially faced three counts of intentional homicide of an unborn child and one count of aggravated assault of a pregnant person; those charges were dismissed as part of his plea deal. The woman was seven weeks pregnant at the time, but the state law applies “from the implantation of an embryo until birth.” It’s alarming that the law focuses on the embryo rather than the pregnant person, but once again, this case shows that rare instances of abortion coercion can be prosecuted under existing law, without pursuing the conservative goal of ending all telemedicine prescriptions.
First Amendment watch
We told you last week that the nonprofit Mayday Health is suing South Dakota for blocking a campaign advertising information about abortion pills. Now, the group has filed a similar lawsuit against the state of Idaho. The crisis pregnancy center chain Stanton Healthcare is currently running billboards in Idaho advertising abortion pill “reversal,” an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment—so it seems the state is just fine with certain kinds of “information” about abortion.
Assaults on queer people
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Trump administration policy barring trans people from military service is unconstitutional. However, the ban remains in effect for now, because the Supreme Court previously allowed the Pentagon to move ahead with enforcing it while litigation continues.
A federal judge in California denied a request from patients for a temporary restraining order to stop Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children's Hospital from releasing medical records related to gender-affirming care to the Department of Justice. After repeatedly losing in its initial attempts to obtain trans people’s medical records, the DOJ landed on a new approach: venue shopping. The Trump administration has issued a steady stream of new subpoenas from the Northern District of Texas—including in this case—even though not a single one of the hospitals it has targeted is in that district. So far, despite their absurdity, these subpoenas have proven harder to block.
We previously reported that NYU Langone Health told patients it was one of the hospitals to receive such a subpoena. A second New York hospital, Mount Sinai, also received one, and told patients and their families that it would comply and share anonymized information with the Trump administration.
Support for same-sex marriage has declined by six points since 2022, driven almost entirely by shifts among Republicans. A Gallup poll found that Democratic approval is unchanged at 87 percent, but Republican support for legal unions has dropped 18 points—from 55 percent to 37 percent—while support among Independents dropped six points to 67 percent. People’s civil rights shouldn’t be a popularity contest, but it’s worth noting these shifts as conservative activists put the 2015 Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges in their sights. When the court overturned Roe v. Wade four years ago this month, Justice Clarence Thomas urged his colleagues to overturn Obergefell and other precedents based on similar legal reasoning.
Funding crisis
Everything keeps getting more and more expensive—we’re all feeling it, and that includes abortion funds. The National Network of Abortion Funds says its members have seen their per-client spending double from 2022 to 2025, from an average of about $200 to $400 per person. That’s partly because abortion bans push people later into pregnancy, and the cost of an abortion procedure increases beyond the first trimester. Large national organizations have also tightened their belts as demand has risen, forcing grassroots funds to try and cover more of patients’ costs. But the prices of flights, hotels, and food are also going up. Colorado’s Cobalt Abortion Fund says it saw a 26 percent increase in spending in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Quick hits
- Doctors across the country aren’t just seeing an uptick in measles cases, there's also an increase in other vaccine-preventable illnesses like whooping cough and rotavirus.
- Speaking of damage to public health from anti-science freaks, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine released new clinical guidance to affirm that acetaminophen, aka Tylenol, is “first-line” defense against pain and fever during pregnancy.
- The later abortion care advocacy group Patient Forward published a guide to accessing abortion after the first trimester. Cofounder Erika Christensen recently reflected on her 2016 later abortion for Autonomy News.
- Illinois is one of the biggest “receiving states” when it comes to abortion care: In 2025, nearly a quarter of people who had to cross state lines for care traveled to Illinois. A new study finds that, before the Dobbs decision, the median one-way travel distance for Chicago Abortion Fund callers was about 69 miles. After Dobbs, it was 228 miles. The travel distances were longest for callers under 18, uninsured, or seeking care beyond 14 weeks of pregnancy.
- Usage of the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline was already on the rise before Dobbs, according to another new study, with greater growth in states that went on to ban abortion. This is yet more proof that abortion access in many states was already abysmal even before Roe was overturned. The hotline is (833) 246-2632.
- A medical center in the Netherlands halted a study investigating whether 50 milligrams of mifepristone weekly could be used as birth control after too many participants got pregnant. (The abortion dose is 200 milligrams, followed by misoprostol.) Lead researcher Rebecca Gomperts, the founder of Aid Access, said it took a decade to get the study off the ground.
- A report on abortion criminalization in Latin America and the Caribbean identified a trend we know all too well here in the U.S.: Hospitals are often a gateway to criminalization.
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