Emergency Abortions, $100K Bounties, and Fetus Plaintiffs: June 9 News Roundup
Plus, what you missed on Autonomy News last week.
Welcome to the first 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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On Autonomy News
Garnet Henderson
Susan Rinkunas
Trump administration
Emergency abortions
Last week, the Trump administration officially rescinded the Biden administration’s abortion-related guidance on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), a law that requires hospitals to provide care in emergency situations. The Biden guidance, issued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, didn’t technically set policy, but simply reminded hospitals of their obligations under existing federal law. With respect to pregnancy, this means hospitals are required to offer abortion care when it’s the necessary treatment for pregnancy complications that endanger a pregnant person’s health—not just their life.
Confusingly, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which is now run by former TV doctor Mehmet Oz, said the 2022 guidance does not “reflect the policy of this administration,” but also said it would “continue to enforce EMTALA.” What does this mean? Who knows! But in combination with the Trump administration’s previous decision to drop the lawsuit United States v. Idaho, in which the Biden Department of Justice had argued Idaho’s abortion ban violates EMTALA, we can surmise that the Trump administration is prepared to let states enforce abortion bans with exceptions narrower than what federal law supposedly allows. That could mean patients being forced to lose organs or limbs before they’re allowed to have an emergency abortion.
Relatedly, the Associated Press reported that a CMS investigation found a Texas hospital violated EMTALA when it sent a woman named Kyleigh Thurman home without treating her ectopic pregnancy in 2024; Thurman lost a fallopian tube as a result. Theoretically, this finding could lead to penalties for the hospital and the doctors involved, but it’s not clear if the Trump administration will pursue them given the above news.
Abortion pills
Finally, last week Food and Drug Administration head Marty Makary echoed health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in saying his agency will conduct a “review” of the objectively very safe abortion pill mifepristone, despite claiming during his confirmation hearings that he wouldn’t restrict access to the drug.
State moves
In related news, four states petitioned the FDA to remove the remaining restrictions on mifepristone in an attempt to limit the fallout of the aforementioned review. The coalition of California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York believes its citizen petition would prevent the agency from changing regulations while the petition is pending.
Yes, a dangerous anti-abortion bill failed to advance in Texas, but Students for Life won’t let it go: They’re calling for a special session to consider Texas Senate Bill 2880, a sweeping crackdown on abortion pills, abortion funds, and telehealth abortion providers that takes SB 8’s bounty hunter provision and juices it up, inviting citizens to sue just about anyone who helps people get abortion pills—and win $100,000. The bill even includes a provision that makes it seemingly impossible to overturn, allowing citizens to sue judges who attempt to do so for the same bounty.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel asked a judge to reconsider her choice to leave in place a law requiring abortion providers to screen patients for coercion. Last month, the judge granted a permanent injunction against a host of other abortion restrictions on the grounds that they violate the constitutional protections for abortion rights adopted by voters in 2022. Nessel argues the remaining requirement is discriminatory because patients wishing to become pregnant or continue pregnancies are not required to undergo state-mandated coercion screening.
Personhood watch
Thankfully, a federal appeals court rejected a class-action lawsuit featuring fetuses as plaintiffs. The bizarre suit sought to overturn a 2019 New York abortion law called the Reproductive Health Act, which codified the protections of Roe into state law. The suit was brought by an anonymous social worker on behalf of all viable fetuses in the state who said the RHA “violated the fetuses’ rights to life and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.” This is an argument for fetal personhood that could undermine not just the 2019 law, but ban all abortions. The judges said the social worker didn’t have standing to sue, but on the last page of the ruling, they appear to lay out suggestions for how future plaintiffs might succeed.
Legal analyst Mike Sacks highlighted the apparent instructions:
Pay attention everyone: this is the right wing’s play to outlaw abortion nationwide, and a panel of Republican federal judges appears to be coaching them on how to succeed next time.
— Mike Sacks (@mikesacks.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 11:31 PM
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Assaults on queer people
The Southern Baptist Convention will vote at its annual meeting this week about whether to direct its members to work to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling. When the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas said the justices should also reverse the right to same-sex marriage, along with the right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut) and same-sex intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas), claiming these rulings were just as specious as Roe. (Thomas notably excluded Loving v. Virginia, another substantive due process case protecting interracial marriages—like his own union to Stop the Steal-er Ginni Thomas.) Now, almost three years later, this powerful group could take up his call on Obergefell.
Assigned Media reported that a New York Times podcast about gender-affirming care for youth will feature audio from the mother of a trans girl who begged producers not to include it.
Quick hits
- The Guardian reported that at least 20 Planned Parenthood clinics across seven states have closed since the start of 2025.
- HuffPost wrote that the Texas midwife arrested in March for allegedly violating the state’s abortion ban still hasn’t been charged with a crime nearly three months later, which experts say is unusual.
- Illinois lawmakers sent a bill to Gov. JB Pritzker that would allow doctors to continue to prescribe mifepristone should the FDA revoke its approval. The bill only applies to drugs whose authorization is repealed beginning in 2025 and are still recommended by the World Health Organization.
- Mother Jones: “A Doctor’s Impassioned Defense of Later Abortions. A third-trimester provider writes the memoir Dr. George Tiller never got a chance to.”
Actual good news
Hope Clinic, an independent abortion clinic that has long served patients in Southern Illinois, has opened a new all-trimester location in Chicago. Another independent clinic, Care for All, is newly open in Wisconsin, offering abortion and other reproductive and sexual health care to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay.
A vaccine for gonorrhea is being rolled out in England, a potential antidote to skyrocketing rates of infection and increasing antibiotic resistance.
Palate cleanser
@klarysa.s except he’s named after frank gallagher
♬ party 4 u - ㅤ
