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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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On Autonomy News
Lawyers for the Food and Drug Administration refused to defend the agency’s decision to allow the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed by telehealth during a hearing at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last week. This reluctance is all the more notable as we await the results of the FDA’s bogus safety “review” that could upend access after the midterm elections. (Share this story on Instagram, Bluesky, or TikTok.)
Garnet Henderson
Federal news
In a win for anti-abortion conspiracy theorists, the Environmental Protection Agency is launching a study that will look for trace amounts of the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol in drinking water in multiple metropolitan areas. The study will examine whether these drugs—along with 1,400 other medications and chemicals—can be detected in the water, but it won’t measure the quantities present or determine whether those quantities could be harmful. Students for Life has led the charge to get the EPA to do something like this, recently touting a questionable study published in an anti-abortion journal which claimed to find mifepristone in drinking water.
The gestational surrogate at the center of the three-state legal battle over the custody of a very sick baby, is taking her case to the Supreme Court. Representing McKenna West, of course, is the Christian nationalist law firm Alliance Defending Freedom. Following a recent court hearing, a Texas judge affirmed the decision of a California court, which had previously found that baby Rumi’s genetic parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, are his legal parents. The Texas judge agreed, and dismissed West from the case. West and her ADF attorneys are now asking the Supreme Court to pause that California court order on an emergency basis. The request will be considered by one of the Court’s liberal justices, Elena Kagan, who is assigned to emergency requests from California. In court filings, West claims that baby Rumi could be transported from Texas to California to be placed in hospice care as soon as this Thursday, though it’s not clear whether that’s even true. Justice Kagan has asked for a response from Gilkar and Ahmed by Friday, September 18.
A group of 13 states, led by Florida and West’s home state of Alaska, has filed an amicus brief in support of West’s case, as have Americans United for Life and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It’s no surprise to see Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier get involved here, as he has recently intervened in two other surrogacy-related custody disputes.
House Speaker Mike Johnson would still like to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood, he told the Washington Examiner, “and we’re looking for legislative vehicles to do that.” The budget law provision that “defunded” Planned Parenthood by making its clinics ineligible to accept Medicaid insurance for one year expired in July, and Republicans’ lack of effort to extend that unpopular policy in an election year has provoked the ire of anti-abortion groups. Johnson also called abortion pills “dangerous,” specifically lamenting the fact that the abortion rate has increased slightly due to the availability of pills by telemedicine.
One of the many things Medicaid funds is educational services for disabled children, as well as medical needs they may have at school. The GOP’s cuts to the program have left schools wondering how they can possibly continue to care for these students.
A proposed nationwide class-action lawsuit filed against Amazon accuses the company of failing to offer basic accommodations for pregnant employees, and firing them for taking breaks or time off for pregnancy-related reasons. This follows similar lawsuits filed by the states of New York and New Jersey.
State news
Texas health officials said they needed more time to submit a report on maternal deaths, meaning it won’t come out until after the midterm elections where Governor Greg Abbott is on the ballot. The Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Report will not include pregnancy-related deaths from 2022 and 2023 and will focus only on deaths from 2024. A health department spokesperson said that the acting health commissioner asked the committee to make multiple additions to “strengthen the report.” In 2024, state lawmakers changed the deadline for health reports to December 1, but minutes from a committee meeting late last year said the report was on track for completion by September 1.
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit challenging two abortion restrictions, arguing that they violate the state constitutional right to liberty. The laws in question require that only physicians provide abortion care, banning other qualified practitioners, and force patients to wait 24 hours between a consultation with a doctor and their abortion, which must be done by the same physician. Neither rule is medically necessary. The Planned Parenthood affiliate says the suit is intended to establish a state constitutional right to abortion. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has a 5-2 liberal majority after a Democrat won an open seat earlier this year. The affiliate previously tried to establish this constitutional right in a case against an 1849 abortion ban that sprung back to life after the Dobbs decision, but the ban got thrown out in a separate lawsuit, leading the Planned Parenthood suit to be dismissed in 2025. There’s a similar “liberty” challenge in Arkansas, where attorneys at Amplify Legal are trying to overturn a total ban based on equality language in the constitution.
An Ohio doctor who forced medication abortion into his pregnant partner’s mouth was sentenced to six months in jail and two years’ probation. Dr. Hassan Abbas, a surgical resident, ordered the drugs online using his estranged wife’s personal information. He pleaded no contest to four felonies, including unlawful distribution of an abortion-inducing drug, and had already been placed on administrative leave. Reproductive coercion is a crime and it should be treated as such. But right-wing groups point to cases like these as a reason for the FDA to end telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone, hoping people will ignore the fact that coercion is usually in the other direction: partners forcing people to get or remain pregnant.
While an upstate New York community was able to save a hospital-affiliated birthing center, a rural Maryland county was not so lucky: A hospital in Cecil County closed its labor and delivery unit this summer. A local lawmaker said the closest place to deliver a baby could be 45 minutes away by car.
Elections
New polling shows a tight margin in Missouri where voters will decide on an amendment that could reimpose an abortion ban and ban youth gender-affirming care, which is already prohibited. A “no” vote is the pro-choice position, and polling is shifting in that direction, though it’s still quite close. A St. Louis University/YouGov poll from August found that 44 percent opposed the amendment, while 43 percent supported it, and 13 percent were unsure. That’s a 12-point net swing toward “no” from February, when the poll showed 39 percent opposed to the ban and 50 percent support.
The Court of Appeals of Virginia heard arguments in the case filed by Charla Bansley, a local elected official who alleges that the state legislature skipped key steps in putting a reproductive freedom constitutional amendment on November’s ballot. The lawsuit was dismissed by a lower court. In appealing that dismissal, Bansley’s lawyers at the right-wing nonprofit Liberty Counsel asked to bypass the appellate court and head straight to the state Supreme Court. The Court of Appeals declined that request, and set a mid-October deadline for briefing in the case.
The Idaho Supreme Court approved re-written ballot summary language for an initiative that seeks to overturn the state’s abortion ban. The change comes after the nonprofit leading the campaign for the initiative, which is called Proposition 1, won its challenge to the state’s misleading ballot language. The organization argues that the revision still fails to inform voters that the ban’s criminal penalties could lead to prison time for doctors who perform abortions. One justice dissented, agreeing on the penalty point and noting that the language contains the term “preborn children,” which is not used in Idaho’s abortion laws.
Who’s paying for the attack ads lambasting Democrats for their alleged support of transgender people? None other than creepy pronatalist billionaire Elon Musk, via his America PAC.
Seven ballot measures in five states—Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, Missouri, and Washington—threaten to restrict the rights of trans people. Behind these ballot measures are “indifference to the well-being of girls, the creation of a surveillance state that encourages the policing of gender, and the exploitation of trans people to promote a broader anti-women agenda,” reports Assigned Media.
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Personhood watch
A new ProPublica analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that, from 2020 to 2025, the number of people who died as a result of ectopic pregnancies more than doubled compared to the previous six years, from 100 to nearly 200. The increases were sharper in states that ban abortion, which have criminal penalties for healthcare providers. “A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” one OBGYN said.
An Ohio woman has been charged with abuse of a corpse in connection with fetal remains found in a dumpster near her home in February. Police officers were dispatched following an anonymous call that said the woman had given birth in her apartment and disposed of remains in a nearby dumpster. She was indicted by a grand jury, in August, and released on her own recognizance.
First Amendment watch
A former abortion clinic in West Virginia launched a public awareness campaign to let residents know that abortion pills by mail are still an option. The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, which turned 50 this year, teamed up with advocacy organization Shout Your Abortion on billboards, mailers and digital advertising targeting. The ads direct people to youalwayshaveoptions.com, a site that compiles information on how people can access pills and lists resources for medical and legal questions.
The Texas Supreme Court said that Yelp will have to face a lawsuit Attorney General Ken Paxton filed against it for placing warning labels on listings for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. The labels say that CPCs “do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers,” which is true. The suit dates back to 2023 and Yelp tried to get it dismissed by arguing that it uses the labels across the country, not just in Texas. A lower court judge threw out the case before an appeals court reinstated it, and the state Supreme Court just denied Yelp’s appeal.
Assaults on queer people
In a new federal lawsuit, the Christian Medical and Dental Associations—one of the organizations that joined forces to form the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and sue the FDA over mifepristone back in 2022—argues that a Colorado civil rights law could force its members to provide gender-affirming care. The religious doctors are represented by (shocker) Alliance Defending Freedom, which argues they should be exempt from a law that prohibits businesses from denying services to people based on gender identity, requires them to use people’s correct names and pronouns, and requires hospitals that provide procedures like mastectomies and hysterectomies to provide them to everyone, regardless of their reason. ADF argues that if the law can force hospitals to provide gender-affirming care, it can require individual providers to do so as well. Big if true!
Prominent Democrats are throwing trans people under the bus in an apparent bid to appeal to people who probably won’t vote for them, anyway. California Governor and likely presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom recently said he agrees with Donald Trump that it’s not fair for trans women and girls to participate in sex-segregated sports. Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa, made a similar comment. In nearby Ohio, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton made similarly disappointing statements earlier this summer. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico said he’s missed the mark on some of his past statements in support of trans people, and that he would support a national ban on gender-affirming surgery for minors—something that is extremely rare in the first place. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, another maybe-future presidential candidate, opposes trans sports bans, as does Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, though he has also made some comments about fairness.
Actual good news
Planned Parenthood of Montana will open a new clinic in the Bozeman area next year and the clinic will provide procedural abortions. Only two of its four existing health centers offer procedures in addition to abortion pills, while the others offer pills only. The affiliate’s CEO said Bozeman is one of the fastest-growing cities in the state.
Quick hits
- Wyoming recently joined the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, a nationwide effort to improve birth outcomes. It’s the very last state to do so.
- “I treat pregnancy emergencies in the ER. Restricting mifepristone ties my hands.”
- 10 things everyone needs to know about fetal personhood laws.
- The woman profiting off the WNBA’s manufactured trans panic.
Palate cleanser
Need to get her lash girl’s name next time.
@thedoediary twins 🤍 #deer #tabishoes #twins #fyp ♬ TOPIA TWINS - ricky
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