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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Federal news
On Friday, Louisiana asked a federal judge for permission to join a somehow-still-active lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration over its regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone. The case is in the courtroom of far-right Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, where Texas and Florida also asked to join last month; a decision on that request isn’t expected until October. Louisiana is represented by a fleet of lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian nationalist law firm that filed the original 2022 suit challenging mifepristone’s FDA approval on behalf of anti-abortion doctors. Last year, the Supreme Court punted their case on standing grounds only, saying the doctors weren’t the right plaintiffs to sue. The case stayed alive because Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho had already asked for permission to intervene, and effectively replaced the doctors as plaintiffs. Louisiana’s proposed complaint cites the Comstock Act—the dormant 1873 anti-obscenity law that abortion opponents claim bans the mailing of abortion pills—by name nine times. In its original 2022 suit, ADF cited the law only by its obscure statute number. It appears they’re a lot more comfortable invoking this Victorian law now.
Louisiana was the first state to criminally indict an abortion provider for prescribing abortion pills to one of its residents, a fact mentioned in its motion to intervene. There’s also an individual intervenor plaintiff, Rosalie Markezich, who also alleges her boyfriend coerced her into taking abortion pills—the current favored narrative of abortion opponents. Reproductive coercion is wrong and law enforcement can file charges for it, but it doesn’t mean the FDA must roll back telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone. Plus, abortion providers note that people are more often coerced into getting or remaining pregnant.
A conservative nonprofit called We the Patriots has filed an emergency appeal before the Supreme Court, urging it to allow religious parents to opt out of California’s school vaccine mandate. The group cited the recent case Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which the court ruled that Maryland parents should be able to opt-out when LGBTQ-related books were used in classrooms. One of the reasons cited that religious families might want to opt out of vaccines? Because vaccines could make them “complicit in abortion,” an old argument based on the bogus claim that vaccines contain fetal cells.
Republican lawmakers in the House have invited top anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America to brief them on Obamacare subsidies that expire at the end of the year. We covered this effort last week but, in short: Congress has to decide whether to extend more generous tax credits for insurance plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges. If they let them expire, people’s premiums will go up during a midterm election year. Groups like SBA seem to understand the political calculus, but are pushing lawmakers to ban subsidies for plans that cover abortion beyond what the Hyde Amendment allows: cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant person. A coalition led by SBA sent a letter to members of Congress demanding that any extension exclude coverage of abortions.
A Republican House member has introduced a federal informed consent bill that would require providers of medication abortions to tell their patients that it may be possible to reverse the effects of mifepristone if they change their mind. This crackpot theory is known as abortion pill “reversal” (APR)—and there is no good scientific evidence to support it. Rep. August Pfluger (TX-11) calls his proposal the “The Second Chance at Life Act” and it’s supported by groups including SBA, National Right to Life Committee, and Students for Life Action. The legislation is unlikely to become law as it would need 60 votes in the Senate in order to pass, but it is nonetheless alarming to see the GOP rally behind this experimental protocol. Autonomy News has been working on a big story about APR, so look out for that in the coming weeks.
State news
With little fanfare, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 7, the bill that allows citizens to sue anyone they suspect of manufacturing or distributing abortion pills, or mailing them to or from Texas, for bounties of at least $100,000. The law will go into effect on December 4. Several “shield” law providers—who live and work in states where abortion is legal, and provide abortion pills to patients in Texas and other ban states—say they won’t back down.
A Missouri judge ordered state officials to rewrite the ballot summary of a proposed constitutional amendment that would repeal Amendment 3, which legalized abortion up to fetal viability after voters approved it last year. The 2026 ballot proposal would ban both abortion and youth gender-affirming care. The ACLU of Missouri sued the state arguing that the proposal violates a single-subject rule for amendments, and because it would ban abortion without the summary actually saying it does that. Unfortunately, the judge said the gender-affirming care ban could stay on the ballot because it is “closely related to reproductive health care.”
Republican lawmakers in Arizona are attempting to get a judge to throw out a lawsuit challenging abortion restrictions that remain on the books despite voters enshrining a constitutional right to abortion until fetal viability last year. An attorney representing Arizona’s Senate president and House speaker claims that the doctors who filed the case have no right to sue because they’re not actually in danger of prosecution, since Attorney General Kris Mayes said in 2023 that she wouldn’t prosecute violations of the state’s abortion restrictions. The lawmakers’ attorney previously argued that remaining abortion restrictions are still valid despite the abortion rights ballot measure.
An appellate court in Ohio heard arguments in the ongoing fight over the state’s six-week abortion ban, which a lower court struck down last year following Ohio’s successful 2023 constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights until fetal viability. The state has acknowledged that the six-week ban can’t be enforced, but is continuing to appeal to fight for other provisions in the law that could be used to criminalize abortion providers. For example, there are hefty penalties for failing to check for embryonic or fetal cardiac activity—which is not actually necessary to do before an abortion. Abortion providers have asked the appeals court to strike down all of these provisions once and for all.
An optimistic Florida Democrat introduced a bill to end state funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. It is unlikely to pass the GOP-controlled legislature, but Rep. Kelly Skidmore is at least highlighting that the state gives these unregulated clinics close to $30 million a year.
Assaults on queer people
The Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, is now circulating a petition urging the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate so-called “transgender ideology violent extremism.” Conservative groups have been falsely claiming that violence committed by transgender people and their allies is on the rise, and news outlets including the Wall Street Journal shamefully fanned the flames by reporting unverified information following the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Anonymous national security officials recently told an independent journalist that the FBI is discussing treating trans subjects as a subset of a recently created threat category—“Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs). Make no mistake: trans people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it, and conservatives are waging a coordinated campaign to erase trans people from public life by denying them access to healthcare, employment, and even bathrooms.
Extremism
On Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will re-hear a case that seeks to bankrupt Planned Parenthood’s national umbrella organization. A “whistleblower” lawsuit filed in 2021 baselessly claims that Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and several of its affiliates defrauded the state of Texas. In United States ex rel. Doe v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, an anonymous plaintiff accuses PPFA of violating the federal False Claims Act by improperly billing Texas Medicaid for $17 million in non-abortion services provided during yearslong litigation over whether it could remain in the program. The suit, later joined by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeks $1.8 billion in penalties. In February, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit said PPFA was immune from the suit, but “Doe,” the anonymous plaintiff, asked for a hearing before the full court, which it approved.
That plaintiff is anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, head of the Center for Medical Progress, which spearheaded an undercover video campaign that falsely accused Planned Parenthood of profiting from the sale of fetal tissue in 2015. Daleiden’s videos were referenced by the suspect in a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood months later. If his suit is successful, it could further decimate access to care across the country.
Quick hits
- “Over the past five years, more than 100 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies or announced they’ll stop in 2025”—and according to new research, this often happens after rural hospitals are absorbed into larger hospital systems. Per the study, rural hospitals were part of more than 450 mergers between 2006 and 2019, and after said mergers, they were 30 percent less likely to provide labor and delivery services.
- Just months after declaring a health emergency over their state’s infant mortality rate, Mississippi officials say they have been forced to stop collecting data for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a national program essential to monitoring pregnancy outcomes and infant health. The database was historically built and maintained by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agency called the Division of Reproductive Health in collaboration with state and local health officials. But the division lost nearly its entire staff in early Trump administration cuts, and experts say there is no one left to meaningfully oversee the program.
- Abortion bans are changing where women choose to go to college. One recent study found that women’s basketball programs in ban states fell by more than eight spots in national recruitment rankings. Another paper found a 2.7 percent drop in the number of “high-achieving women” (defined as those scoring in the 90th percentile or higher on the SAT or ACT) applying to college in ban states.
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