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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.
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Federal news
The one-year “defund” of large abortion providers like Planned Parenthood expired on July 4 after Congressional Republicans failed to extend it, enraging abortion opponents. But, importantly, not every affiliate has had its Medicaid funding restored. The Planned Parenthood affiliate serving Indiana is still cut off from Medicaid reimbursements as the state is seeking to enforce a 2011 law that bans state funding to any organization that provides abortions. While Indiana has outlawed abortion since 2022, the affiliate serving the state—Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, and Kentucky—provides abortions in states where it’s legal. Planned Parenthood said in a report that nearly 30 of its affiliated clinics shuttered as a result of the federal “defund,” with 64 percent of the closures in states where abortion is still legal. It’s incredibly difficult for clinics to re-open after they’ve closed. One of the recently announced closures includes Iowa City, which means that, starting in August, Planned Parenthood will have just one brick-and-mortar clinic left in Iowa. In 2017, the state had 10. Planned Parenthood Michigan closed its education department in an effort to close budget gaps, showing that the “defund” fallout extends beyond direct health services.
The Supreme Court came within just one vote of ending birthright citizenship last week, in a clear contradiction to the text of the Fourteenth Amendment. The far-right reactions were disgusting. Vice President JD Vance said the outcome was all the more reason to vote in the midterms so Republican Senators have a chance to confirm justices who will finish the job. White House deputy chief of staff and racist goblin Stephen Miller, meanwhile, appears to want to block pregnant people from other countries from entering the US. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed to agree that the US should limit the entry of people later in their pregnancies. The Justice Department released a memo hours after the decision directing prosecutors to prioritize so-called “birth tourism.” Katie O'Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women's Law Center, told Axios that "the idea that data about who's pregnant and how pregnant could get into the hands of the federal government, much less the state governments, that's a really dangerous proposition."
As it did during the first Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services reorganized its Office for Civil Rights to emphasize religious freedom and conscience rights—aka turbocharging the ability of clinicians at HHS-funded facilities to refuse to provide abortions, vaccines, and gender-affirming care.
The right-wing Daily Signal reports that a few House Republicans were told the Food and Drug Administration might complete its bogus safety “review” of the abortion drug mifepristone in September. A federal judge handling the lawsuit that Louisiana filed against the FDA requested an update from the agency by early October, six months from the date he paused the litigation at the FDA’s request.
Disability rights advocates are increasingly concerned that the Trump administration will force them or their loved ones to be institutionalized. The Justice Department recently lowered the legal bar to force disabled people into institutions against their will. The White House also shifted oversight of disability education to the Health Department, putting the education of disabled people under the control of Health Secretary and eugenics enthusiast Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
State news
Laws that restrict access to reproductive healthcare took effect last week in Iowa, Mississippi, and Tennessee. In Iowa, the law now requires in-person visits before doctors can prescribe medications including mifepristone and misoprostol, and pregnancy loss reporting requirements require providers to tell the state if a patient took these medications within 14 days of a pregnancy loss. Another Iowa law requires parental consent for HPV and hepatitis B vaccines, which teens could previously receive without parental involvement. In Mississippi, the amendment adding mifepristone and misoprostol to the state’s drug trafficking law is in effect, making distributing these medications punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Finally, Tennessee also added an in-person dispensing requirement for medication abortion. That law allows the state attorney general to impose fines of $10,000 per violation, up to $1 million.
The New Jersey legislature passed a “shield” law that would protect providers who offer reproductive healthcare—which, as defined in the bill, includes gender-affirming care—to patients in ban states, or patients who travel to New Jersey. It establishes a right to reproductive healthcare in the state, even when that care is banned elsewhere, and like the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, makes it a crime to interfere with access to that care. This portion of the law caused some controversy, with critics saying the way it was written may violate protesters’ First Amendment rights. However, the measure passed, and now awaits the signature of Governor Mikie Sherrill.
A pending constitutional amendment in Virginia that would protect the right to abortion until fetal viability faces a legal challenge from a county supervisor who alleges that the clerk of the House of Delegates missed a procedural step by failing to send copies of the amendment to every circuit court clerk in the state. Lawmakers removed that requirement this year, but critics argue the process still should have been followed since the amendment was voted on in the legislature prior to the rule change. A hearing later this month will decide whether the case can go forward. A second challenge brought by plaintiffs represented by an anti-abortion organization argues the ballot language is “deceptive.”
Organizers behind the campaign to get a reproductive rights constitutional amendment on the Idaho ballot this fall turned in nearly 110,000 signatures. Idaho law requires that a measure receive signatures from at least 6 percent of registered voters statewide—roughly 70,000 people total—including 6 percent of voters in at least 18 of 55 districts. Organizers say they’ve met this bar. The measure would overturn Idaho’s total ban and establish a right to abortion until fetal viability, with very limited exceptions thereafter.
Meanwhile, an anti-abortion group in Nebraska failed—for the second time—to submit enough signatures to get a measure onto the ballot that would have instituted a total ban on abortion.
Montana became the second state, after Nebraska, to implement the new Medicaid work requirement well ahead of the 2027 deadline, hiring dozens of new workers to manage the process.
Elections
The Maine Democratic Party called on Senate nominee Graham Platner to drop out of the race after a woman accused him of sexual assault in a Politico story. The allegations came after other past romantic partners described “unsettling” behavior to the New York Times. Platner recently earned the nomination to take on Republican Susan Collins, whose vote to confirm Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh was instrumental in the fall of Roe v. Wade. Collins also continues to confirm anti-abortion judges to lifetime seats. The seat in Maine is considered a must-win for Democrats to have any hope of Senate control in 2029 and the deadline for candidates to remove their name from the ballot is July. The state party would then have until July 27 to select his replacement.
Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, a 30-year incumbent and co-chair of the House Reproductive Freedom Caucus, lost her primary last week to attorney and Democratic socialist Melat Kiros.
Wisconsin Senate minority leader Dianne Hesselbein wrote an op-ed with her colleagues reminding voters that if Democrats flip the legislature this fall, they could pass a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights. Currently, Republicans control the Senate 18 to 15 and the House 54-45.
Personhood watch
Anti-abortion legal provocateur Jonathan Mitchell dropped his lawsuit against California doctor Remy Coeytaux, in which his client, plaintiff Jerry Rodriguez, is a convicted abuser. But this was just a bit of legal maneuvering: Mitchell immediately refiled the suit, adding Rodriguez’s daughter as a plaintiff. Coeytaux’s attorneys had argued that Rodriguez couldn’t sue their client under HB 7—the supercharged Texas “bounty hunter” law that allows people to sue those who provide, distribute, or mail abortion pills for at least $100,000—because he’d been convicted of a family violence offense. Mitchell had asked to add Rodriguez’s daughter as a plaintiff in the case to solve this problem, though he did so after the deadline to amend the complaint. As a biological relative of the fetus at the center of this wrongful death lawsuit, she is theoretically eligible to sue under HB 7. It seems Mitchell simply dropped the case and refiled it rather than waiting for a judge to make a decision on his request.
Just weeks after calling himself a “strong supporter” of in vitro fertilization, Texas Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton walked that back, saying “We need to have restrictions, so that we don’t lose fertilized eggs, if that’s possible.” Embryos aren’t people, Ken.
Relatedly, proposals in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas would impose new reporting requirements on providers of assisted reproductive technology, including IVF, much like the invasive laws abortion providers and patients have long been subject to. These policies would require providers to report information to the state about things like patients’ fertility treatment outcomes, and their decisions about what to do with extra embryos. “These bills are framed as transparency, but they risk turning private medical decisions into political targets and making IVF harder to access for the families who need it,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
Assaults on queer people
In a devastating 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states can ban transgender athletes from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams. The first such ban was enacted in Idaho, and 25 states have since passed similar laws. Conservative groups celebrated their victory and vowed to enact bans in Democratic-led states, too, via litigation.
One of the ways activists are trying to pass trans sports bans in “blue” states is via ballot measure. A measure in Washington state would require kids to prove their “biological sex” before playing on sports teams. That would mean undergoing a visual genital exam, a DNA test, or a blood test to measure testosterone levels. For kids. To play school sports.
Even far-right judge Reed O’Connor has limits, it turns out: In its lawsuit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission asked O’Connor to issue an order preventing WPATH from “seeking relief” in any other court. That’s because WPATH has its own lawsuit against the FTC ongoing in another district. O’Connor didn’t go for it, putting the request on hold after speaking with the judge in the other case.
A federal judge in California blocked a grand jury subpoena for the medical records of transgender patients from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. This was one of several grand jury subpoenas that came out of the Northern District of Texas after the Justice Department’s mostly failed efforts to use administrative subpoenas to force gender-affirming care providers to produce patient records. A New York judge previously issued a similar block on grand jury subpoenas sent to hospitals in New York City.
While the Trump administration’s attempt to cut off gender-affirming care for those incarcerated in federal prisons is on hold by court order, the state of Missouri has enacted its own version of the policy. Governor Mike Kehoe signed a law that prohibits the use of state funds for gender-related care for incarcerated people. The law could effectively force people to detransition without so much as a plan to taper off their medications.
Actual good news
After a state judge struck down medication abortion restrictions on the basis of Missouri’s 2024 reproductive freedom ballot measure, Planned Parenthood is expanding access to abortion pills, including at a Kansas City-area clinic where they will be available for the first time ever.
Quick hits
- A group of women sued Nebraska in federal court over its ban on nurse midwives assisting in home births. It’s the only state with such a prohibition.
- We’ve been telling you this and now The Downballot explains: “How a GOP plan to elect judges could end abortion rights in Kansas.”
- Conservatives are using the anti-abortion playbook against birth control: spreading mis- and disinformation, advancing incremental restrictions, and denying problems with access.
Palate cleanser
“Babe what’s wrong, you haven’t even touched your maxi pad float.”
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