Author: Shoshanna Ehrlich

Shoshanna Ehrlich is professor emerita of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Who Decides: The Abortion Rights of Teens and the co-authored Abortion Regret: The New Attack on Reproductive Freedom. She is currently a legal consultant with Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts, with a particular focus on the reproductive rights of teens.

A Double Blow to Abortion Rights in Idaho: Prop 1 Fails at the Ballot Box, and a Federal Court Sides With the State

The elation that so many of us have been feeling in the wake of the mid-terms has been tamped down in Idaho as the result of two powerful and closely related reminders that the unremitting attacks on abortion rights are not going to let up any time soon. 

First, on Oct. 30, a divided panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an interim decision in the case of Seyb v. Idaho Board of Medical Examiners privileging Idaho’s “profound interest” in protecting fetal life over a pregnant woman’s right to self-preservation when faced with a health-threatening condition or the risk of death due to self-harm. And then on Nov. 3,  in sharp contrast to the outcomes in the other three states where abortion was on the ballot, Idahoans rejected Proposition 1, which would have legalized abortion until viability (with an extremely narrow emergency exception), which leaves one of the nation’s strictest criminal abortion bans in place.

In Landmark Case, California Argues False Abortion Pill Reversal Claims Aren’t Protected by the First Amendment

On Sept. 17, following nearly three years of litigation and a six-week trial, California’s Department of Justice delivered its closing arguments in a landmark case against RealOptions Obria and Heartbeat International, seeking to stop their use of “false and misleading claims to advertise abortion pill reversal” (APR), as Attorney General Rob Bonta described it in a press release.

APR is the unproven and potentially dangerous flooding of the body with a high dosage of progesterone after taking mifepristone, the first pill in the FDA-approved medication abortion protocol, but before taking misoprostol, the second approved pill in the sequence.

APR has become an increasingly central tactic in CPCs’ relentless post-Dobbs efforts to persuade what they call “abortion-vulnerable” pregnant women to carry their pregnancies to term.

The trial court is expected to issue its ruling by Dec. 16, within the 90-day period allotted under California law. Given the evidence presented at trial, a ruling in California’s favor could mark a significant victory in efforts to hold CPCs accountable for promoting false and misleading claims about a procedure that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has denounced as “unproven and unethical.” Such a decision would also send a powerful message: The First Amendment does not give organizations a free pass to mislead pregnant women about their medical care.

‘It’s About Who Gets to Decide’: Massachusetts Will No Longer Impose a Gestational Limit on Access to Abortion Care

Gov. Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act into law last month, making Massachusetts the 10th state, together with Washington, D.C., that does not impose a gestational limit on access to abortion care.

In so doing, Healey stressed the “heartbreaking stories” she heard “from women and families who were preparing to welcome a healthy baby into their family, only to receive devastating news later in their pregnancy. Instead of being able to rely on the doctors they knew and trusted at home, they were forced to travel hundreds of miles and pay out of their pockets while navigating unimaginable grief.”

I recently had the privilege of talking with Kate Dineen who shared her tragic experience of being denied abortion care in Massachusetts because of the state’s “24-week ban with very difficult to access exceptions.” 

Here is her story.

Talking Back to Dobbs: Federal Judge Says Idaho Can’t Force Pregnant Women to ‘Endure All Harm Short of Death’

A federal district court issued the first post-Dobbs decision recognizing the U.S. Constitution still protects the right to abortion in specific circumstances.

And while legal opinions rarely move me to tears—as even the most progressive outcomes are typically cloaked in legal jargon that does not communicate the often urgent or tragic human experience underlying the case—Judge B. Lynn Winmill’s deeply attentive opinion in Seyb did just that.

Idaho has one of the nation’s strictest abortion regimes: Abortion is generally criminalized at every stage of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions. As Winmill writes, as a direct consequence of this ban, “a woman’s body itself is conscripted into service and forced to bear permanent damage in service of the potential life she carries.”

Winmill ruled Idaho’s abortion ban was unconstitutional on two grounds.

1. It violated the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause by denying pregnant patients a fundamental right to medically indicated abortion care.

2. By excluding self-harming behavior from the law’s life-saving exception, it denied patients with mental-health conditions equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

In their initial complaint, the plaintiff Dr. Seyb and his legal team that the requested relief “will address only a fraction of the harm that Idaho’s Abortion Bans are causing.” While meaningful, they wrote, such relief alone cannot secure justice for all Idaho residents; that would require repeal of the abortion bans through legislation or direct democracy—or the Supreme Court’s reversal of Dobbs.

Voters may soon have an opportunity to pursue that broader relief: In the upcoming midterms, Idahoans can cast a vote in favor of the Idaho Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, a ballot initiative to restore abortion access in the state.

The Kids Really Are All Right—But Opponents of Marriage Equality Won’t Admit It

Within days of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the administration began erasing LGBTQ+ people from federal websites, while Republican governors across the country rebranded Pride Month as celebrations of the “traditional” or “nuclear” family.

At the same time, public support for marriage equality has begun to slip, and conservative activists are seizing the moment to revive their campaign against Obergefell v. Hodges. Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, they are laying the groundwork for a new legal challenge—one designed to persuade the Court’s conservative majority to reconsider the constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

But this latest effort relies on a familiar myth dressed up as a new argument: that children are the “real victims” of marriage equality. The evidence tells a very different story. Decades of research—and a recent meta-analysis examining children’s developmental well-being—show that children raised by same-sex parents do just as well, and in some measures even better, than those raised by heterosexual parents. The real harm comes not from loving families, but from efforts to deny them equal dignity under the law.

Opponents of marriage equality are working hard to revive old attacks on marriage equality. We cannot allow this campaign of erasure to succeed.

A Federal Court Just Struck Down Idaho Abortion Restrictions. The Win Could Set the Stage for a Bigger Fight at the Ballot Box.

When most people think about post-Dobbs abortion litigation, they assume every lawsuit is trying to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision. But a groundbreaking case in Idaho charts a different course. Brought by maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Stacy Seyb, the lawsuit argues that medically necessary abortion care is protected by a constitutional right Dobbs never addressed: the fundamental right to self-preservation.

To understand this novel legal strategy, I spoke with Wendy Heipt, a senior attorney at Legal Voice and a member of Seyb’s legal team. Rather than asking the courts to revive Roe, Heipt argues that no state can force a pregnant person to sacrifice their life or health by denying medically necessary care.

“This case isn’t about abortion,” she told me. “It’s about self-defense.”

If the courts agree, the case could establish a new constitutional framework for protecting pregnant women facing medical emergencies—even under the legal landscape created by Dobbs.

It is a reminder that some of the most consequential battles over reproductive freedom may turn not on revisiting old precedents, but on recognizing constitutional protections the Supreme Court never considered.

The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion

When South Carolina’s abortion abolitionist bill, the Unborn Child Protection Act (S. 1095), was voted out of committee and onto the full Senate floor in late April—“an unprecedented move toward locking up women who have an abortion,” according to Dana Sussman in Slate—it raised a question: How much influence have abortion abolitionists gained within the broader antiabortion movement?

Abortion abolitionists, who seek to criminalize abortion without exceptions and punish women who obtain abortions as murderers, have long been considered the outer fringe of the antiabortion movement. Their roots can be traced to what Colleen Scerpella described in The Prospect as “a new generation of mostly white, male, conservative Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Reconstructionists”—or what she calls “extreme Christian patriarchy.”

As I wrote in Ms. a little more than a year ago, the dramatic increase in abortion abolitionist bills filed by state lawmakers after Roe v. Wade fell, signaled the growing influence of this movement.

That extremism has not gone unnoticed: In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified four abolitionist organizations as “male supremacist hate groups.” Recent research has likewise found that the strongest supporters of arresting women who have abortions are Americans who endorse Christian nationalism, believe “true Americans are white,” and look to the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order.

The South Carolina bill, which makes the pregnant woman herself subject to misdemeanor liability, prompted me to revisit the question of whether abortion abolitionists have made more inroads into the mainstream antiabortion movement.

The evidence suggests they have.

Banned From Talking About Third-Trimester Abortion Care at a Texas Medical School: The Ms. Q&A with Dr. Shelley Sella

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) cancelled Dr. Shelley Sella’s scheduled campus talk in January about her recent book Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, which she had been invited to give by the Texas Tech chapter of Medical Students for Choice (MSFC) in collaboration with MSFC’s Board of Directors. The administration told right-wing outlet Texas Scorecard that it decided hosting her was “not in the best interest of the university.” The decision to ban Sella from campus was made after days of coordinated activism by the Turning Point USA chapter at Texas Tech in conjunction with two antiabortion activists: Mark Lee Dickson and Jim Baxa. 

The cancellation of Sella’s talk was not “an anomaly,” as Jessica Valenti of Abortion, Every Day writes, but part and parcel of the “antiabortion snitch culture” on college campuses—”part of the broader conservative attack on academia that’s gained steam over the last few years.”

“And it’s not just impacting a few schools or professors,” Valenti continues. “Antiabortion groups are determined to eradicate any iota of pro-choice speech on college campuses. Now is the time for us to make as much noise as possible and not back off one single inch.”

Taking seriously Valenti’s call to “make noise” rather than retreat in the face of escalating efforts to suppress pro-abortion speech, Ms. sat down with both Sella and Claire Surkis, a medical student in Connecticut who serves on MSFC’s Board of Directors, to explore the impact and implications of the university’s actions.

Trump Considers Blocking Abortion Access for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors in Federal Custody (Again)

and

A looming policy change threatens to undo existing protections and leave pregnant immigrant teens in federal custody without meaningful access to abortion care.

We won’t know what direction the rule will take until the proposed rule is released, but if the Trump administration’s antiabortion policies—such as the reinstatement of the Veterans Administration’s ban on abortion and abortion counseling, the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the reinstatement of an expanded global gag rule—are any indication, the rights of this marginalized population are at great risk.

Three Women Veterans on the Devastating Reality of the VA Abortion Ban

The Trump administration is no longer providing abortion care for veterans relying on VA healthcare, even in instances of rape and incest.

Through firsthand accounts, veterans describe the fear, medical risk and loss of autonomy created by the policy.

“Abortion is my right, if that was what I deemed I needed.”

“No patient in America should have to go back and forth with their providers … and for damn sure not with no politicians about what medical care they are allowed to have.”

“We are all people who volunteered. We raised our hands and said, ‘yes send me.’ Healthcare is our right as veterans.”