Antiabortion Laws

Antiabortion laws in America vary significantly by state, with some states imposing severe restrictions that effectively ban most abortions, often as early as six weeks into pregnancy. These laws have sparked intense legal and social debates, with reproductive rights advocates emphasizing the importance of women’s autonomy and access to safe medical procedures. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has further fueled activists’ efforts to protect reproductive freedom and ensure equitable healthcare access across the country.

Keeping Score: 137 Women Are Killed by Partners or Family Per Day; Bipartisan Push for Epstein Files; Trans Day of Remembrance and Native Women’s Equal Pay Day

PUBLISHED 12/9/2025 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—137 women and girls are killed by intimate partners or family members every day.
—Congress votes overhwlemingly to force the Justice Department to release their Epstein files.
—Donald Trump snaps at women journalists: “Quiet, piggy” and “you are an obnoxious—a terrible, actually a terrible reporter.”
—Violence against trans women remains high.
—DACA recipients are being targeted and detained under the Trump administration.
—Higher-income college students often receive more financial support than they need, while low-income students struggle.
—Tierra Walker died from preeclampsia in Texas after being repeatedly denied an abortion.
—Viola Ford Fletcher died at age 111. She was the oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. 
—North Dakota’s total abortion ban was reinstated after the state’s Supreme Court reversed a temporary injunction from a lower court. There are now 13 states with total bans.

… and more.

International Telehealth Provider ‘Abortion Pills in Private’ Ready to Ramp Up if FDA Restricts Mifepristone

PUBLISHED 12/8/2025 by

As Trump’s FDA threatens to block U.S.-based medical providers from offering telehealth abortion, one international telehealth provider—Abortion Pills in Private—has vowed to continue providing mifepristone and misoprostol to U.S.-based patients, no matter what.

Their commitment is clear: “We will continue to send mifepristone, even if the FDA takes it off the market inside the U.S.. … We want to make this service easy, the best experience that it can be, with dignity. You can just go online, and it’s easy, and there’s no judgment. If you need this, we are here for you. Here are your pills. Here’s the support service that you need. You can do this from home. Whatever the reason is, we want to have that service there for you to be able to do that, no matter where you live.”

Their service and determination grew directly out of the post-Roe crisis. People find Abortion Pills in Private through the Plan C website. Since March 2024, they have served almost 3,500 patients in the U.S., most of them living in the hardest-hit states—those with abortion bans and severe restrictions. “They are from all over, but they are very much from banned states. Texas is always number one. Then Florida, Georgia. Even Ohio and Pennsylvania. There are some blue states too.”

Republicans’ ‘National Backdoor Abortion Ban’

PUBLISHED 12/8/2025 by | UPDATED 12/9/2025 at 8:55 A.M. PT

Millions are on the brink of seeing the costs of their health insurance skyrocket if Congress fails to extend the ACA tax credits due to expire Dec. 31.

Now, Republicans are seeking to use the debate over the tax credits to pursue what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has warned is a “national backdoor abortion ban” by expanding the scope of the Hyde Amendment.

Since 1977, the Hyde Amendment has prohibited the use of federal funds for abortion except under limited exceptions for cases where the life of the woman is in danger, or in cases of rape or incest. But opponents of abortion in Congress want to prohibit ACA marketplace plans from covering abortion even in states where abortion remains legal. This means that even if a state requires insurance plans to cover abortion, and uses its own funds to do so, federal law would block it. Private insurance plans sold through the ACA marketplace would also be impacted.

A vote on the issue is expected in the Senate on Thursday, Dec. 11. 

War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremist Charged in S.C. Shooting; Army OB-GYN Accused of Abusing Over 85 Women Patients

PUBLISHED 12/1/2025 by and | UPDATED 12/4/2025 at 9:06 A.M. PT

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—North Dakota’s Supreme Court reinstated a total abortion ban, making it the 13th state with a near-total ban on abortion.
—Trump ordered Catherine Lucey, a woman reporter for Bloomberg, to be “quiet, piggy.”
—The U.S. moved to categorize countries with state-sponsored abortion and DEI policies as violators of human rights.
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued Planned Parenthood over allegedly “misrepresenting the safety” of abortion pills.
—On Thursday, Dec. 4, an unprecedented law banning doctors from shipping abortion pills takes effect in Texas.
—”The country’s most respected newspaper hosted a conversation about whether women’s equality and freedom was a mistake.”
—Doctor Maj. Blaine McGraw, an OB-GYN at Fort Hood military base in Texas, the third-largest base in the country, is under investigation for sexual abuse against patients. As of Monday, 85 victims have come forward.
—With Jeffrey Epstein survivors watching from the gallery above, the House agreed in a near-unanimous vote to force the release of all files related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender.

… and more.

A Bill Criminalizing Abortion Failed in the South Carolina Senate, But S.C. Prosecutors Have Long Treated Pregnancy as a Crime

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

We have to talk about South Carolina.

Last week, what could have become the most punitive abortion law in the U.S., SB 323, failed in the South Carolina Senate. The bill proposed banning abortion in almost all circumstances, criminalizing people who sought abortion care, and removed any exceptions for rape, incest or fetal anomaly currently written into the state’s already strict six-week ban.

The defeat of SB 323 is a victory that was won by dedicated and fierce advocates from across the state and across the country. But South Carolina has been actively engaged in policing the bodies of pregnant women, and in criminalizing pregnancy, for decades.

The prosecutorial “hold my beer” approach to criminalizing abortion shows us not only just broken the criminal legal system is, but also, just how little regard they have for the humanity of people with the capacity for pregnancy. 

Novel ‘Truth Is’ Shows What It Really Takes for a Teen to Get an Abortion in 2025

PUBLISHED 11/22/2025 by

Truth Is is a pro-choice novel in every sense of the phrase. Truth’s choice to move forward with an abortion is made early on in the novel and the majority of the book focuses on her life and her choices after her decision.

I hope that years from now, a student picks up this book and reads about the challenges that the book’s main character Truth faces and goes, “Is that really how it was back then?”

For adults who engage with Truth’s story, I want us to consider the limitations we sometimes unknowingly put on young people. I want us to consider the heights young people could reach if they were granted opportunities and community support, the way Truth ultimately does in the novel.

The War on Women Report: Government Shutdown Continues; Another Woman Denied Emergency Abortion Care; FDA Approves Generic Mifepristone

PUBLISHED 11/3/2025 by and

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—Turning Point hosted an event at the University of Alabama advocating the death penalty as punishment for abortion patients.
—After being denied care for her ectopic pregnancy by an antiabortion OB-GYN, a 28-year-old woman in Illinois was forced to travel to multiple hospitals and healthcare centers before receiving life-saving care.
—Vocal abortion opponent Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the Prohibiting Abortion and Transgender Procedures on the Exchanges Act, seeking to halt any healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from funding abortions, even in states that preserve abortion access. 
—The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that judges can decline to marry same-sex couples if doing so goes against their religious beliefs.

… and more.

New California Shield Law Protects Abortion Pill Patients, Prescribers and Pharmacists

PUBLISHED 10/25/2025 by

California’s new shield law, AB 260, represents a bold reimagining of what it means to protect reproductive freedom in a post-Dobbs America. By allowing prescribers and pharmacies to omit identifying information from mifepristone labels—and by ensuring that confidential logs can’t be accessed by out-of-state authorities—the law does more than safeguard privacy. It dismantles the machinery of fear and surveillance that antiabortion extremists have built to track, intimidate and punish people for exercising bodily autonomy. In a nation where a single prescription can become evidence in a courtroom, California has declared: not here.

The legislation’s power lies in its refusal to accept intimidation as the cost of care. It shields patients, prescribers and pharmacists alike, and even mandates coverage of mifepristone regardless of the FDA’s shifting political winds. At its core, AB 260 is both a legal and moral statement—that access to abortion medication is not a privilege to be defended in court, but a right to be protected in law. For anyone navigating pregnancy in hostile states, California’s message carries weight and relief: You can seek care without fear that your name, your doctor’s name or your pharmacist’s name will be weaponized against you.

The New York Times’ Recent ‘Abortion Pollution’ Story Serves the Antiabortion Agenda

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by

For the last three years, Students for Life of America (SFLA) has sought to use environmental concerns to attack abortion rights, claiming—without scientific evidence—that the medication mifepristone contaminates U.S. water supplies and threatens wildlife, the environment and potentially human health.

A recent New York Times article amplified this antiabortion effort, presenting these claims without substantial context. The article does not include interviews with anyone informed about the politics behind the campaign or the science of mifepristone in wastewater. Only a brief mention—seven paragraphs in—notes that environmental experts have dismissed SFLA’s claims, before returning to treating the claims as a legitimate concern. 

“There is absolutely no evidence that this is an environmental issue,” said Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Pharmaceutical waste can be a big issue when we’re talking about widely used drugs, but to somehow point to mifepristone as a bad actor here is completely disingenuous.”

Jack Vanden Heuvel, a molecular toxicologist at Pennsylvania State University, agreed: “Most wastewater treatment plants are very effective at getting rid of any mifepristone that is there.” He described SFLA’s position as “a pretty weakly supported argument.”

America Is an Increasingly Dangerous Place for Women and Girls 

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by

In America’s hyper-macho, gun-drenched culture, growing up female has never been safe. But under the Trump administration, America is becoming a much more dangerous place for women and girls.

America is dangerous for women and girls because our leaders choose to make it so. The Trump administration has already begun blocking access to abortion and Medicaid coverage for reproductive health, as well as targeting the rights of pregnant people within the 2023 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Already, the macho culture of the U.S. has steadily made women’s safety in the nation decline. Around 41 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence, while a third of women reported severe assault by a husband or boyfriend. The normalization of gun violence and violent pornography have also run rampant across the country, making America more dangerous day by day.