Table of Contents
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
We have a new piece coming very soon. For now, catch up on our two stories you might have missed last week.
Garnet Henderson
Susan Rinkunas
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Federal news
The Department of Health and Human Services announced an investigation into 13 states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion care. The HHS Office of Civil Rights argues that these states—California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—could be violating a policy called the Weldon Amendment. The amendment was first enacted in 2005 and bars states from discriminating against healthcare entities and providers who refuse to provide or cover abortion services due to religious or moral objections. Like the Hyde Amendment, the Weldon Amendment is not a standalone federal law, but rather a rider that gets included in spending bills each year. “President Trump’s claim that he wants to ‘leave abortion to the states’ is an absolute lie, and this latest attack on abortion access is further proof,” said Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, in a statement. “At a time when abortion care is getting harder and harder to access, we are deeply concerned that the few states that have taken steps to protect access are now under attack.”
New data shows how the Trump administration’s “defunding” of Planned Parenthood has affected patient care. Senate Democrats released a report on the 2025 budget law that blocked large abortion providers from getting reimbursed under the Medicaid program for non-abortion services for one year. Planned Parenthood says 23 clinics shuttered after the bill took effect and that visits for IUDs declined by 36 percent in December compared to the prior year, while breast exams and STI testing fell by 25 and 11 percent, respectively. Also in defund news, a coalition of 22 states and Washington, D.C. dismissed their lawsuit against the Trump administration after an appeals court ruled against them in December. But this fight still isn’t over: As we’ve explained, some Republicans want to make this policy permanent via a second budget bill that would only need 50 Senate votes.
Amid the budget crisis at Planned Parenthood’s affiliates, Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has fined Planned Parenthood of Illinois $500,000 for alleged discrimination against white employees. To be clear, the CEO of PPIL said it agreed to pay the settlement in order to end an investigation and “put this matter behind us,” but it couldn’t come at a worse time.
Regrettably, it’s another week with Josh Hawley news. The Missouri Senator sent a letter to Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, two makers of the abortion pill mifepristone, informing them that he’s opening an investigation into their business practices. Hawley is demanding the companies provide him with a host of documents, including their communications with Food and Drug Administration regulators and information about their manufacturing and supply chains, by late April. Hawley has also created a hotline and email address for “women who have been harmed by chemical abortion to confidentially share their stories with his office.”
Folks, Josh Hawley is asking people to email AbortionDrugHarms@hawley.senate.gov ….. Would be a shame if plausible subject lines actually contained the text of screenplays or the Gettysburg Address www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-opens...
— Susan Rinkunas (@susanrinkunas.com) 2026-03-22T19:39:29.754Z
As you might recall, one of the wackier arguments some anti-abortion organizations have advanced in their attempts to attack medication abortion is that it’s polluting our water. To that end, Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, and Sheri Biggs of South Carolina have introduced the "Clean Water for All Life Act." The bill would require an in-person exam for all medication abortion patients—which isn’t medically necessary—and require that patients collect pregnancy tissue in a “catch kit” and return it to a provider for disposal. Miller’s press release also says the bill would outlaw medication abortions “conducted without the physical presence of a healthcare provider.” The full text isn’t yet available, so it’s not clear whether this is solely an attempt to ban telemedicine, or whether it would effectively ban all medication abortions, because even people who get their pills at a clinic are taking them and having their abortion at home. Even in a Republican-controlled Congress, the bill is a long shot.
Last month, we covered the horrifying revelation that the Trump administration has been sending pregnant migrant girls to a shelter in Texas, a state where abortion is illegal, as a means to deny them abortion care. The shelter is also reportedly not equipped to handle the complex medical needs of pregnant children. All this is despite federal policy that requires the Office of Refugee Resettlement to ensure access to all forms of pregnancy care, including abortion. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking more information about the relocations.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 363 immigrants who were pregnant, postpartum, or nursing between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026. Federal policy restricts ICE from even detaining pregnant or nursing people except in extreme circumstances, let alone deporting them. While the Trump administration hasn’t formally rescinded this policy, they are clearly ignoring it.
Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran could affect the supply chain for generic medications made in India, which need ingredients that travel through the Strait of Hormuz. The US gets nearly half its generics from India and one such medication is misoprostol, used in abortions, miscarriage care, postpartum hemorrhage and more.
State news
A ballot measure in Missouri that would reinstate a total ban on abortion, and ban gender-affirming care for minors, is polling positively (47 percent to 40 percent) ahead of the November election. That’s despite voters passing abortion protections in 2024. We'll have more for you tomorrow.
An Ohio House committee advanced a bill that seemingly violates the state’s 2023 abortion rights constitutional amendment. HB 347 would require a 24-hour waiting period and mandated counseling before an abortion, even though a judge blocked enforcement of a similar state law under the amendment as a lawsuit proceeds. The bill now goes to a full House vote before consideration in the Senate.
South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden signed three anti-abortion bills into law during a ceremony at an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center. House Bill 1274 makes it a felony to “dispense, distribute, sell, or advertise” abortion pills, or any item intended to produce an abortion. We’ve told you about this bill before as it’s an attack on free speech and follows a successful effort to censor a medication abortion information campaign from Mayday Health. Rhoden also signed HB 1257, which specifies that, under the state’s abortion ban, treatments for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy are not abortions subject to criminal penalties. Finally, HB 1313 requires public schools to show students a video about prenatal development that’s at least three minutes long. Though it does not mention the “Meet Baby Olivia” video from anti-abortion group Live Action by name, it is a version of their model legislation.
Mississippi lawmakers are one vote away from passing a bill to make it illegal for clinicians to prescribe medications “with the intent of causing an abortion,” punishable by one to 10 years in prison. HB 1613 doesn’t mention mifepristone and misoprostol by name, but Republican Rep. Celeste Hurst said she added this provision as an amendment to a drug trafficking bill because she wanted to target out-of-state providers mailing pills. Those doctors send prescriptions under so-called “shield” laws that protect them from criminal investigations, so the actual effect of the bill may be that it scares Mississippi doctors out of prescribing the drugs for miscarriages and other pregnancy care. The House passed the bill in February and the Senate passed it earlier this month, but it needs final approval in the lower chamber before it can advance it to Governor Tate Reeves.
Since a six-week abortion ban went into effect in Wyoming on March 9, the state’s one brick-and-mortar abortion clinic has sent at least 20 patients out of state. That’s not counting patients who normally would have been served by other telemedicine providers, though some are likely still accessing telehealth abortion from providers living in “shield” law states. Abortion providers have asked a judge to tack a challenge to this ban onto an ongoing case in which he blocked a host of other abortion restrictions, and the first hearing related to that request is on March 30.
In Missouri, pregnant people can currently file for divorce, but judges can refuse to finalize the divorce until after a child is born. However, the state legislature has passed a bill that would fix this problem, and the governor is expected to sign it.
Personhood watch
The Associated Press obtained the arrest warrant for a Georgia woman facing murder charges after healthcare workers reported her for an alleged self-managed abortion with misoprostol. As we covered last week, Georgia law doesn’t permit prosecuting people for their pregnancy outcomes—even with a six-week abortion ban in effect. The warrant claims the woman’s medical records estimate her to be 22 to 24 weeks pregnant and that the fetus, delivered at the hospital, survived for about an hour. The warrant asserts that “under Georgia law, the victim became a person at the moment of live birth.” But Dana Sussman, the senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, told Autonomy News that the state could face a constitutional challenge if prosecutors attempt to apply the abortion ban’s personhood language to the totally separate homicide law. Autonomy News contacted District Attorney Keith Higgins’ office to ask whether they will pursue an indictment for murder and they have not yet responded. Media literacy note: The woman isn’t being prosecuted “under Georgia’s abortion ban,” as some outlets claim. If that were the case, she’d be facing charges of “criminal abortion,” not murder.
An Ohio bill would require doctors to file a “certificate of life” for embryos and fetuses within 10 days after cardiac activity is detected on an ultrasound. HB 754 would also require the registration of all fetal deaths, including abortions. The state already requires physicians to submit a detailed report about every abortion, but this bill would effectively expand that invasive requirement to miscarriages. Given the uptick in pregnancy criminalization, it would be beyond alarming for a state to have a record of every fetus.
Assaults on queer people
In late December, a coalition of 19 states and Washington, D.C. sued the Trump administration to block a proposed rule that would deny all payments from Medicaid and Medicare to hospitals and other facilities that provide any gender-affirming care to minors. Underlying this plan was an official declaration from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that youth gender-affirming care does not meet the standards of medical practice. The states argued that this declaration should have gone through the public notice and comment periods required for federal regulatory changes. A federal judge in Oregon just agreed. After a lengthy hearing last week, the judge ruled from the bench that Kennedy had exceeded his authority and that the declaration was invalid. A full, written opinion—and likely HHS appeals—are still to come.
In February, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reversed a long-held position, declaring that gender-affirming surgeries should be delayed until age 19. A New York Times story declared the American Medical Association had also adopted a more conservative stance on gender-affirming care, though information on the organization’s website suggested otherwise. Now, the Times reports that, shortly before all this happened, TV doctor-turned Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz called representatives from these medical societies, as well as the American Psychiatric Association, to his office to meet with anti-trans ideologues. (The APA has not buckled to the administration and continues to support gender-affirming care.) Times reporter Jeremy Peters expressed some awfully strong feelings about gender care in the comments on his article. It’s almost as though the paper of record doesn’t mind “bias” when it goes in a direction top editors like!
Two anti-trans ballot measures will appear on the 2026 ballot in Colorado, having received enough signatures to be certified by the Secretary of State: Initiative 109 would require students in the state to compete on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth, and Initiative 110 would prohibit gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
Extremism
20-year-old Montana man Charles Felix Jones was arrested for entering an abortion provider’s backyard with a gun. He told authorities that he had planned to shoot the doctor but changed his mind due to “cowardice, mercy, or something greater.” Jones said he approached the back door while the doctor was eating dinner with his family, knocked on the window, and dropped the gun. Police say Jones threw the gun and other items at the window. He told detectives he’d been active in anti-abortion causes for years, and had driven into Missoula from his home a little over an hour away for an anti-abortion event at Blue Mountain Clinic. (Blue Mountain, one of the state’s two brick-and-mortar independent abortion providers, was firebombed by an extremist in 1993 and later rebuilt.) Jones said he found the doctor’s home address online, and that he was inspired by Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He also confessed to shooting into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Helena in 2023, when he was just 17 years old. No suspects had previously been identified in that incident. His parents confiscated his firearms last year, he said, but he had gotten one gun back without them realizing. After leaving the doctor’s house and driving home, Jones turned himself in to local police.
Quick hits
- Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum people. Due in part to an abortion ban and lax gun laws in Mississippi, the state leads the nation in pregnancy-related gun deaths.
- When it comes to menopause hormone therapy, patients in Missouri don’t know who to trust.
- Maine Governor Janet Mills is running for Senate, in part on her record protecting abortion rights. But her position on the 60-vote filibuster would doom federal abortion protections under a Democratic president, as Susan wrote in Slate.
- The latest polling from Pew Research shows that 60 percent of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
- Thanks to an aforementioned shield law, clinicians in Massachusetts provided more abortions in 2024 to people in other states than to residents. You can understand why these laws make abortion opponents very mad and why they want to end telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone.
Palate cleanser
Sucks to suck.
@sanjipami On a serious note the things going on are seriously not about immigration anymore, they’re about power and control and every single American should be extremely scared of the complete disobedience of our legal system and foundation of our republic rn. Inspo @Seerat Saini ♬ original sound - Arden Jones
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