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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
Did you know that survivors of sexual assault might be billed for some of the care they receive in the emergency room? Or that some religious hospitals prohibit staff from telling rape survivors about emergency contraception? Learn more in this op-ed from three experts about how sexual assault care in the emergency room often fails patients. (Share this story on Instagram, Bluesky, or TikTok.)
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Federal news
The Department of Health and Human Services abruptly cancelled $68 million in grants under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, two years before they were set to expire. HHS halted 53 out of 67 existing grants, with at least one termination notice citing a “misalignment” with agency priorities. HHS told a Philadelphia-based program that it “normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.” The first Trump administration tried a similar move in 2017, but it was permanently blocked thanks to a lawsuit. The grant cancellations come amid a far-right panic over declining birth rates—decreases that have largely come from fewer births among young people. Separately, the Trump administration is attacking the country’s only family planning program, Title X, by trying to shift the focus from birth control to conception and slashing its budget. Last year, the administration sought to require TPPP recipients’ programming not to recognize more than two genders, but a judge threw out the guidance.
A top anti-abortion group is trying to ratchet up pressure on the Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit that Louisiana filed over the abortion drug mifepristone. A group of more than 80 organizations, led by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, sent a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche urging him to broker a consent decree that ends telemedicine prescriptions of the drug. Louisiana sued the Food and Drug Administration in October to try to reimpose outdated in-person appointments for mifepristone, and now that the Supreme Court denied its request to ban telemedicine mifepristone while the case proceeds, conservative groups are trying everything they can to restrict access. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has also called on Blanche to settle the lawsuit, and even implied that his vote for Blanche to officially become AG may depend on it. (Blanche’s initial confirmation hearing is scheduled for July 15.) In related news, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled arguments in the case for September 9 after granting Louisiana’s request to expedite it.
Eleven Senators are demanding that the Trump administration take down Moms.gov, the federal government website that purports to offer “resources, information, and help for new and expecting mothers,” but directs them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. This follows a letter from more than 80 House Democrats requesting answers about what offices, agencies, contractors, or outside organizations were involved in the project.
The hardline House Freedom Caucus sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson demanding a third budget reconciliation bill that would allow Republicans to extend the “defund” of Planned Parenthood and other large abortion providers with only 51 votes. As we’ve told you several times, most Congressional Republicans agree that doing so during an election year is a no-go. At least one Planned Parenthood affiliate in Ohio says it’s ready to resume accepting Medicaid insurance after the one-year “defund” expires on July 3.
A new study confirms that pregnant patients in states with total abortion bans are getting lower-quality care in their pregnancies, including delays or substandard interventions for common complications like ectopic pregnancy and preterm labor. One estimate found that people in total ban states are nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period. Another study estimated that there were 68 additional pregnancy-related deaths in the first 18 months after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Four years after Dobbs, it’s difficult to quantify the exact impact of abortion bans—but every denied abortion, or delayed intervention, is one too many.
Trump administration sources say that ultimate creep Stephen Miller—Trump’s white nationalist deputy chief of staff—was the main driver behind a Department of Justice memo that gave states the go-ahead to institutionalize disabled people rather than funding community-based care.
Supreme Court watch
The current Supreme Court term will end on Tuesday with the court’s last four decisions, but the justices are already teeing up cases for the next round starting in October. Today they agreed to hear a real doozy on parental rights: Whether nonprofits and a group of parents can challenge Washington state laws that require licensed homeless shelters to notify the state—not a child’s parents—if a runway minor seeks gender-affirming care or reproductive health services. Washington state called the laws “modest steps to address the crisis of transgender youth homelessness.” Lower courts dismissed the case, International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson, by saying the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue. The plaintiffs are represented by the Stephen Miller-founded America First Legal Foundation and recurring villain of this newsletter Jonathan Mitchell. They’re now asking the high court to solve the matter. The parents’ brief argues that the laws deny parental consent for gender-affirming care—by which they mean parents’ ability to refuse that care.
State news
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill into law that will let patients request that information about abortion or diagnoses of gender dysphoria be separated from the rest of their digital health records. That shielded information cannot be shared with out-of-state entities without patient consent—an important consideration given that almost a quarter of people nationwide who crossed state lines for an abortion in 2025 got their care in Illinois, per the Guttmacher Institute. The governor’s office proposed the legislation, known as the Reproductive Health Records Privacy Act, and Pritzker said at the bill signing that “no state should be allowed to weaponize medical information in an effort to undermine rights that are protected here.” However, the law doesn’t take effect until July 2027. Pritzker also signed a separate bill that will remove testosterone from the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, a database intended to protect against misuse of addictive drugs. The bill, HB 4834, also prohibits the state from adding estrogen, or the abortion medications mifepristone or misoprostol, to the program.
Crisis pregnancy center director Jana Pinson just can’t stay out of the news: First, she apparently tipped off anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson about the story of Liana Davis, the Texas woman who alleges a Marine put abortion pills in her hot chocolate. Then, Pinson cited Davis’ highly dubious story in legislative hearings while advocating for the extreme abortion pill ban HB 7—and according to recently released text messages, became friends with Davis, who was looking to “take [her ex] down.” Most recently, Pinson was back at the Texas Capitol demanding still more restrictions on abortion pills, again claiming without real evidence that increased availability of abortion pills leads to reproductive coercion.
Iowa’s six-week abortion ban took effect in summer 2024. Planned Parenthood North Central States said the number of abortions it provided in the state was down 80 percent in 2025 when compared in 2023, but that it saw a 220 percent increase in Iowa patients traveling to Nebraska for care. Once again, abortion bans don’t stop abortions, but they do make them unnecessarily difficult to get.
On the Dobbs anniversary, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a joint $495,000 investment to expand the city’s Abortion Access Hub, a confidential hotline. Previously, the state pledged to give New York City Health and Hospitals $10.7 million over three years to fund abortion care, and the state will continue to invest $220,000 in the Hub annually. NYC sexual health clinics offer no-cost medication abortion, and according to the city, 70 percent of Hub clients are locals.
Elections
Planned Parenthood Action Fund will spend an additional $2 million to unseat House Republicans who voted to “defund” Planned Parenthood for one year. As we explained above, a third, party-line reconciliation bill is likely not happening in 2026, but PPAF is trying to prevent a similar provision from passing in 2027 or 2028 during the next Congress. They’re targeting Reps. David Schweikert (AZ-01), Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06), Gabe Evans (CO-08), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Bill Huizenga (MI-04), Tom Barrett (MI-07), Mike Lawler (NY-17), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01), and Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07).
As we warned last week, Missouri Republicans are seizing on a court ruling that allowed clinics to offer abortion pills for the first time since 2018 as a reason that voters should approve a new abortion ban this November. GOP Governor Mike Kehoe responded to the ruling by saying: “Now more than ever, it’s critical for Missourians to vote YES on Amendment 3 in November and make it abundantly clear that our state stands for life and the protection of mothers.”
Abortion provider advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health will launch a 501(c)(4) political lobbying arm in the next five years. PRH said this step is necessary to “provide more avenues to promote evidence-based sexual and reproductive health policies and correct mis- and disinformation from officials and candidates.”
Personhood watch
Last week, a group of more than 60 far-right abortion opponents publicized a resolution calling on lawmakers to allow criminal prosecutions of people who have abortions by removing “legal immunities.” As Susan explained in MSNOW, of the 21 signatories who lead anti-abortion organizations, just three are women. (That’s as of early Monday evening; a husband-and-wife duo from Protect Life Michigan appear to have removed their names earlier today.) The male dominated movement advocating for so-called “equal protection” laws is the most extreme form of fetal personhood: They believe that if all fertilized eggs are human beings, then abortion is murder and should be prosecuted as such.
An Army captain was sentenced in military court to 12 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to drugging his partner—a junior enlisted soldier—with mifepristone, causing a miscarriage. Captain Brandon Jones-Adams, 34, pleaded guilty to intentionally killing an unborn child, domestic violence, fraternization, and conduct unbecoming of an officer. Jones-Adams allegedly ordered the mifepristone online. Experts say that reproductive coercion more often involves a partner pressuring someone to get or remain pregnant, but anti-abortion advocates have nonetheless seized on these rare cases as if they are a justification for ending telemedicine access to mifepristone. Even if the FDA were to halt telemedicine prescriptions, abusers can still buy mifepristone online without a prescription because that’s how the internet works.
The National Abortion Federation adopted its first policy position since Dobbs, formally opposing laws that allow states to ban abortion at fetal viability, or impose any other “gestation-based lines.” Four years after Dobbs, support for viability lines and protections for later abortion care remain a source of conflict within the reproductive rights and justice movements, but perhaps this professional organization’s decision to move beyond the Roe framework marks a new era.
First Amendment watch
The abortion pill information nonprofit Mayday Health is suing South Dakota, asking a federal judge to bar the state from enforcing a law that bans the advertisement of abortion-inducing drugs against Mayday. In recent filings, South Dakota argued that the Charley chatbot on Mayday’s site—which is designed to help connect users with abortion care—violates this law. In response, Mayday took down the chatbot on June 21, and now the state is mad it can no longer access the bot’s responses. Mayday had previously settled a dispute with South Dakota after Attorney General Marty Jackley intervened to stop a gas station advertising campaign. Mayday agreed to take down the ads and not to purchase any new ones going forward, but sued the state over its new ban on abortion pill advertising late last month.
We’ve reported on how the anti-abortion movement is using Democratic states’ attempts to regulate crisis pregnancy centers against them. The first of these legal battles to reach an actual trial is a California case, filed by Attorney General Rob Bonta against the major anti-abortion group Heartbeat International and RealOptions, a local CPC chain. Bonta’s office has accused CPCs of engaging in false advertising by promoting the unproven and potentially dangerous treatment known as abortion pill “reversal”; the CPCs say the AG is trying to limit their First Amendment right to free speech. The trial kicked off last week in California state court. While CPCs are likely to lose, the ultimate goal here is to get a case to the Supreme Court, where CPCs have already notched big wins. There are likely still years of appeals and legal back-and-forth to come.
The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability sent a letter to New York Attorney General Letitia James urging her to investigate whether crisis pregnancy centers in the state are falsely advertising their ability to diagnose ectopic pregnancies. After a Massachusetts woman sued a CPC over its failure to diagnose her ectopic pregnancy—which resulted in the rupture of her fallopian tube—the umbrella organization National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) told its members not to claim they can “rule out” ectopic pregnancies. But CFA found at least 100 examples in 49 states of CPCs still using this language. Another recent report from Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that most CPCs don’t identify a medical director on their websites, and when they do, fewer than half are OBGYNs, and the vast majority have primary jobs elsewhere.
Assaults on queer people
After Kansas invalidated the state IDs of hundreds of transgender people because their gender markers didn’t match their sex assigned at birth, one woman changed her marker back to “M”—and then got charged for driving without a valid license, because a cop who pulled her over thought the license couldn’t be real. Fortunately, the county prosecutor has dropped the charge against her, but something similar is almost certain to happen again.
New York City will invest $15 million over two years to support access to youth gender-affirming care—but it still will not provide this care in city-run clinics. The $15 million is also significantly less than the $65 million Mayor Zohran Mamdani initially pledged.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his family were the target of a swatting incident in which someone made a false report to Child Protective Services claiming he was a danger to his children. Buttigieg was forced to spend 24 hours away from his four-year-old twins, who were removed from their home during the investigation.
Actual good news
In fall 2025, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast dissolved—it closed its last two remaining health centers in Louisiana, and its Texas locations became part of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. Now, a new clinic is set to open in New Orleans later this year, with telehealth care starting later this summer, all under the umbrella of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, whose other clinics are in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. The New Orleans clinic will offer birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, gender-affirming care, menopause care, vasectomies, and more.
Quick hits
- A helpful new map from the National Health Law Program shows which states have restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion.
- A group of Minnesota abortion providers say that seeing patients from other states has become their “new normal.”
- If/When/How’s Repro Legal Helpline has fielded nearly 12,000 calls since Dobbs. From 2024 to 2025, callers’ top five home states were Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and questions about self-managed abortion were the top reason people called.
- This new video from RePROs Fight Back explains the importance of sexual and reproductive healthcare during humanitarian crises.
- Spain has blocked the website of Women on Web—which provides information about how to get and safely use abortion pills—since 2020. Women on Web is now challenging this decision before the European Court of Human Rights, represented by Women’s Link. The Spanish Supreme Court previously ruled in Women on Web’s favor, but health authorities never complied with the ruling and unblocked the site.
- Australia’s privacy commissioner released a report finding that fertility provider Monash IVF and telehealth platform Medmate broke the country’s privacy laws by using tracking pixels to obtain personal information about internet users. They then matched this personal information with social media profiles on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest and used this data to create lists of users to target with ads for their services.
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