1). “Abortion, Every Day (2.26.24): Idaho has lost nearly a quarter of OBYNS”, Feb 26, 2024,
Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
2). “What a Second Trump Term Will Bring: The ban on IVF in Alabama is just the beginning if Trump wins again”, Feb 26, 2024, Jill Filipovic, Slate,
3). “Birth Control Is Next: If you look closely, attempts to restrict contraception are already in the works”, Apr 21, 2023, Christina Cauterucci, Slate, at < https://slate.com/news-and-
4). The anti-abortion plan ready for Trump on Day One: The stakes of the election go far beyond whether a GOP president signs a bill banning the procedure”, Jan 29, 2024, Alice Miranda Ollstein, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
5). “The right’s war on birth control is already starting: A new conservative incrementalism wants to erode access to birth control and lay the groundwork for a future ban”, Oct. 10, 2023, Mary Ziegler, Professor at the UC Davis School of Law, MSNBC, at < https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/
6). “Gavin Newsom launches red-state abortion ads over ‘war on travel’: The Democratic governor from California lobbed his latest salvo against conservatives who are trying to further restrict abortions by imposing new bans on out-of-state travel”, Feb 25, 2024, Christopher Cadelago, Politico,
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The never ending offensive against the right's of women to control their bodies continues in the U.S. Anybody who thinks that this will stop, just with the shift in control of abortion by the various ultra-reactionary proto-fascist Red State Regimes is deluded. These attacks on our rights will continue. First they will continue with with assaults against the right to contraception, and if the far-right manages to destroy those rights; expect attacks on union organizing, free speech, and any economic rights and assets you have. That includes Social Security and Medicare, the endless assault on Medicare, mounted by billion dollar insurance companies has succeeded in hoodwinking half of Medicare beneficiaries into joining the fraudulent “Medicare Advantage” that is not actual Medicare but a phonied up private insurance scheme designed to steal people's homes and last assets when they get truly sick at the ends of their lives.
Project 2025 has posted a 920 page manual entitled, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, (at < https://thf_media.s3.
The Democratic Party is, at best, a status quo organization that merely does not propose new authoritarian measures; not a party that will lead a progressive movement. Gavin Newsom has taken the fight to the Red States. He appears on Fox News and debates the reactionaries. He would be a far better Presidential Candidate that Joe Biden is. It is impossible to predict what is going to happen but it would be nice if he was the candidate in the general election. The return of Trump would be a disaster of the first rank, and not just for reproductive age women. The ad Newsom's organization has put on TV in Tennessee is a powerful message. It is linked to in the article about Newsom (Item 6). “Gavin Newsom launches red-state abortion ads ...."
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Abortion, Every Day (2.26.24)
A new poll gives Democrats ammunition in the GOP’s War on Birth Control. In Ballot Measure News, updates from South Dakota, Nevada and more. In the States, news from Washington and Oklahoma. OBGYN Exodus looks at the nightmare in Idaho. In Travel Ban News, a new ad campaign on Tennessee’s ‘anti-trafficking’ bill. In the Nation, why the Alabama IVF decision is dangerous for the whole country. In 2024, Trump’s bullshit ‘compromise’. And finally, Conservative Media Watch flags an anti-abortion messaging tactic for nonviable pregnancies.
The War on Birth Control
File under not shocking but vital. A new poll conducted by Americans for Contraception found that the vast majority of voters believe birth control access is important (and at risk). The survey reports that 80% of voters say that protecting access to contraception is “deeply important” to them, and that 72% of Republicans also support birth control. (Who is the 28% that opposes??)
What’s more, 64% of voters were less likely to support Republican candidates when they were told how the legislators voted against the Right to Contraception Act. That means birth control is a really dangerous topic for Republicans, and that Democrats should be talking about it all the time. Not just because it polls well—but because Republicans are, in fact, attacking contraception.
As you know by now, the primary tactic the GOP is using to go after birth control is focusing on IUDs and the morning-after pill—types of contraception that the anti-choice movement claims are abortifacients. In fact, Americans for Contraception urged Democrats to focus on the specific forms of birth control under attack:
“Don’t shy away from talking about all forms of contraception, including I.U.D.s and emergency contraception like Plan B. Contraception is popular, and voters want to be the ones making the decisions on what methods they use. They do not draw distinctions between types of birth control, and neither should we.”
In other words, this is the perfect time not just for Democrats to be talking about birth control—but publicly asking Republicans what they think of certain kinds of contraception. For the love of all that is good: Don’t let them get away with pivoting!
Ballot Measure News
As multiple states try to push through abortion rights ballot measures this year, pro-choice groups continue to disagree about exactly what kinds of protections to include. (I’ve been writing a lot about how activists in Missouri, for example, oppose the ‘viability’ language in a proposed measure.)
This week, there are similar concerns bubbling up in South Dakota, where a pro-choice ballot campaign is in the process of collecting signatures. Rachel Cohen at Vox reports that the major abortion rights groups in the state—the ACLU of South Dakota and Planned Parenthood North Central States—have criticized the effort from Dakotans for Health.
The concern is that the measure—which would protect abortion in the first trimester and allow restrictions related to the “physical health of the pregnant woman”—doesn’t go far enough.
Tim Stanley, Planned Parenthood North Central States vice president of public affairs, says, “As the sole abortion provider in South Dakota for more than 30 years, Planned Parenthood is acutely aware of the impact policy language can have on patients’ lives.” Pro-choicers also say that the organizers behind the ballot effort didn’t consult the abortion rights activists already on the ground.
Cohen’s piece also gets into important questions of who can speak and organize for abortion rights—an issue we’re going to see come up a lot more in the coming months.
A ballot measure campaign in Nevada launched this weekend, complete with anti-abortion protesters who rushed the stage and ripped up signs. Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom (N4RF) needs to collect a little over 100k signatures by June 26th to get abortion rights on the ballot.
If the measure were to pass this year, it would need to pass again in 2026 in order for the state constitution to be amended.
Remember, abortion is already legal in Nevada—but as is the case in a few other pro-choice states, activists want to enshrine abortion rights for an extra layer of protection. The proposed amendment includes a ‘viability’ restriction.
Quick hits:
The Washington Post looks at the dirty tricks Missouri Republicans are playing in order to stop voters from having a say on abortion rights;
The Arkansas Times asks why national funders aren’t giving to the state’s ballot measure campaign;
And more on Minnesota’s effort to enshrine abortion rights through the state’s Equal Rights Amendment.
In the States
Abortion may be legal in Washington, but women are worried about losing access anyway thanks to hospital mergers that are increasing the number of religious health systems in the state. Right now, nearly half of the hospital beds are in religiously affiliated institutions—these are hospitals that won’t perform abortions, prescribe birth control, or provide gender-affirming care.
That’s why Democratic Sen. Emily Randall has introduced the Keep Our Care Act. The bill that doesn’t require hospitals to provide abortion care (if only); instead, it creates a process to stall or stop bigger religious hospitals from buying small community health care centers and discontinuing existing care. The bill would also give Washington’s Attorney General oversight and enforcement power in such mergers.
Related: If you missed my article about how Catholic hospitals are killing women by driving up the maternal death rate, check it out here.
I’m overdue on a longer piece about these kinds of laws, but for now I wanted to flag this bill out of Oklahoma that’s seeking to make abortion medication illegal by labeling those who dispense it ‘drug traffickers’. Rep. Jim Olsen, who drafted the legislation, says, “We got the abortion clinics closed in 2022…but then we’re losing a lot of it through these medications.”
Remember, legislation like this is being deliberately crafted to go after abortion funds, but could also allow for the arrest of anyone who obtains a friend or family member abortion pills.
Quick hits:
NPR has a short segment on how California college students don’t often know that their campuses offer free abortion medication;
A Kansas columnist asks why ‘pro-life’ legislators in the state aren’t calling for a ceasefire in Gaza;
Michigan Republicans really wish Democrats would stop talking about abortion rights;
Massachusetts legislation seeks to prevent deceptive tactics by anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers;
And The Texas Tribune has an important piece on the barriers that disabled Texans face when trying to access abortion.
OBGYN Exodus
Since Roe was overturned, we’ve watched OBGYNs and maternal fetal medicine specialists flee anti-choice states. They’re understandably worried that they could be arrested for doing their jobs, and that they won’t be able to give their patients the standard of care. Perhaps nowhere has that been more evident than in Idaho, where OBGYNs have been leaving en masse and only a handful of maternal fetal specialists remain.
A new study shows just how bad the care crisis has gotten in the state: 51 of 227 OBGYNs have left, a loss of nearly 23%. What’s more, only half of Idaho’s counties have a practicing obstetrician, the state has lost two vital maternity wards, and only two new OBGYNs have moved to the state to practice since Dobbs.
Those are terrifying numbers. The Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare, the parent group of the organization that released the report, says it “should concern every person living in or considering a move to Idaho.”
I don’t know how you can see this as anything other than a total health emergency, because we know what happens next—maternal and infant mortality will spike. But we may never know just how badly those maternal death numbers go up, because the state disbanded it’s maternal mortality review committee. (Since then, an Idaho Republican has introduced a bill that would have the state board of medicine collect the data—a move doctors in the state have serious concerns over.)
Travel Ban News
California Governor Gavin Newsom has launched the first in a series of television ads about Republicans’ attacks on the right to travel. The spot, called “Hostage,” features a teenage rape victim who has been handcuffed to her hospital bed. It will run in Tennessee, where Republicans are considering a travel ban framed as an ‘anti-trafficking law’.
The ad is powerful, but distressing. And I can’t help but be a bit depressed that it takes talking about the rape of teenagers to get people to care about this issue—the fact that we’re human beings should be enough. But we know—from ads like the one Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear used in his reelection campaign—that this kind of focus works.
It’s also clear that Republicans are nervous about the effort. One GOP strategist called it “over the top.” Tab Berg told CBS News, “I mean a handcuffed girl, 15-year-old rape victim, I mean it’s so absurd.”
But on Meet the Press this weekend, Newsom said the tone of the ad is just meeting the moment:
“That’s how serious this moment is. And we need to be even more aggressive, I would argue. And that’s what this ad represents.”
While I’m glad to see the spot getting such good media attention—there were articles about it everywhere—there’s been one huge gap in the coverage: Tennessee’s travel ban is only talked about a ban on travel. As I’ve written about so many times before, these ‘abortion trafficking’ laws would also make it illegal to give a teenager gas money, or even share information with them about an out-of-state clinic. (That’s why a similar law in Idaho has been blocked; a judge said it violated free speech rights.)
It’s vital that we’re reminding voters of the far-reach these kinds of laws could have.
In the Nation
Let’s talk about fetal personhood for a minute. It’s been on everyone’s mind since last week’s decision from the Alabama Supreme Court—but this thought from law professor Mary Ziegler just put a renewed chill down my spine.
Ziegler says that the danger of the Alabama decision is a national one, because the more states that adopt fetal personhood laws and rulings, the more likely the U.S. Supreme Court can say that fetal rights is a matter of history or tradition: “They’re going to say, ‘Well, look, there’s also all these states that hold this position.’” Terrific.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren says there’s no question that Republicans will pass a national abortion if they take control come November: “The only question is how big and how bad—but it will be there.”
Finally, you already knew that Kate Cox would be attending the State of the Union this year as a guest of First Lady Jill Biden. This week, we found out that another woman denied care will in the audience: Dr. Austin Dennard, who was invited by Texas Rep. Colin Allred. If Dr. Dennard’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s spoken publicly (including with me at a recent Senate press briefing) about needing to leave the state for care after finding out her fetus had a fatal abnormality.
Personal stories have taken center stage in the post-Roe abortion rights fight, with women coming forward with horror story after horror story and Republicans struggling to respond.
Quick hits:
KFF Health News on the rise of ‘abortion navigators’;
The Washington Post has a brief outline of the abortion rights cases headed to SCOTUS;
And Bloomberg on how Democratic governors are bracing for SCOTUS’s mifepristone ruling.
2024
Let’s talk about Donald Trump’s new plan for how to win over voters pissed off post-Roe: he wants to ban abortion at 16 weeks. For some reason the disgraced former president thinks that adding on an extra week to Republicans’ standard 15-week national ban will be a big hit.
But just like all the abortion ‘compromises’ from the GOP, this simply won’t work. Just ask Virginia—who made a multimillion dollar bet on a 15-week ban and got walloped! People don’t like bans, full stop. It doesn’t matter if they’re 15 weeks or 6 weeks.
The other thing about these ‘middle ground’ bans is that they don’t have exceptions for nonviable pregnancies! If they’re law, Kate Cox wouldn’t have had to leave Texas for an abortion—she would have had to leave the country. The majority of post-Roe horror stories that are horrifying and motivating voters come from women who were later on in their pregnancies. So Trump’s 16-week ban isn’t going to fix Republicans’ problem with voter outrage.
And remember, even if Trump were to add a so-called exception for doomed pregnancies, it won’t mean a thing. Republicans are already drafting bills defining nonviable as death “upon birth or imminently thereafter”—meaning states could say a newborn who would only live a few days doesn’t have a fatal condition.
But the most important thing to remember is that this 16 week talk is a distraction. Regardless of what happens with a national abortion ban, a Trump presidency would allow for a backdoor ban that would impact every single state.
Besides, any ban is an extreme ban because pregnancy is too complicated to legislate. The sooner Dems start repeating that truth (and pushing for it in their policies) the better.
Meanwhile, Jill Filipovic has a good piece at Slate about what a second Trump presidency would mean for reproductive rights. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s just one bit that hits the nail on the head:
“They want to restore a man’s right to be the financial and political head of his household, with his wife and children legally subservient. They want to remove women’s abilities to control our reproduction and determine the number and spacing of our children, because they know that without that ability, we simply cannot be as free as men—cannot pursue education to the same degree, cannot pursue anything in life we might want, will simply be tethered to more-powerful men and see our lives and our futures curtailed.”
Finally, RJK Jr. struggled to answer questions about IVF and abortion this weekend, responding to a question about how he’d protect reproductive rights by saying, “I don’t know, you tell me. What should I be doing?” He also refused to say when he believes life begins.
Conservative Media Watch
Nonviable pregnancies have become a focal point of abortion rights lately, especially with stories of women denied care going viral. And while Republicans quietly push a campaign to force women to carry doomed pregnancies to term, conservative media is doing their own work on the issue—and this Fox News piece is the perfect example.
Check out how they describe exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities:
“Legislative attempts to include abortion exceptions for unborn babies with disabilities are beginning to crop up in pro-life states amid controversy surrounding a Texas woman who struggled to get an abortion after her baby was diagnosed with a genetic condition in the womb.” (Emphasis mine)
I’ve written about this messaging before, but it’s worth repeating: they are trying to make people who end nonviable pregnancies sound like monsters who are targeting disabled kids. It’s unconscionable. (Keep an eye out for this kind of language from your representatives.)
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The Recent News on IVF Has Confirmed What Trump Is Coming for if He Wins Again
This is a lightly adapted version of a piece first published on Jill Filipovic’s Substack—subscribe to that here.
Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos kept frozen at a fertility clinic are actually “extrauterine children” and therefore considered people under Alabama law. In response, Alabama fertility clinics are predictably pausing some of their operations, recognizing that fertility medicine as it’s widely practiced may now be extremely legally risky and potentially even criminal in this new “pro-life” legal landscape.
Anti-abortion groups unsurprisingly see this as a win and plan to push for more. Denise Burke, senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-abortion group that has been a key architect of abortion bans nationwide, told the New York Times that the decision was “a tremendous victory for life.” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told the Times, “I can’t name one pro-life group that I know of that would say that they are OK with the I.V.F. procedure.”
And it’s these same anti-abortion groups hoping to end IVF and deem any fertilized egg a person who have the ear of Donald Trump, and are helping to create his second-term strategy.
Trump learned some important lessons from his first term. Chief among them: Don’t cater to or staff your team with moderates or “reasonable” Republicans. Find people with the ability and inclination to carry out your desires, no matter who objects or what it costs the nation.
The people who have stepped up to the plate are Christian nationalists and newly emboldened anti-abortion groups—although “anti-abortion” doesn’t even cover it, given that these same groups are working to scale back access to reproductive health care including contraception and fertility treatments. And none of this is a secret; they’ve literally published a playbook on their strategy.
Leading the effort to force through far-right legislation, democracy be damned, is the Heritage Foundation. It’s also working with a series of other groups, including just about every major anti-abortion organization, to radically reshape the government and the country. The next president, these groups write in their Mandate for Leadership, must enshrine conservative values and crush liberal ones, starting by “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
And that’s just the start. Some of the most extreme anti-abortion groups, including those that oppose IVF and many forms of contraception, have the ear of the man they hope will be president, despite his stated claim that he’d only restrict abortion after 16 weeks. “The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly,” Hawkins told Politico. “Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”
Hawkins’ group and some of the country’s other most extreme anti-abortion groups are already working with Trump to map out how his administration might swiftly and thoroughly strip abortion access from all Americans. These groups are clear that on Day One of a Trump presidency, they expect their man in the White House to end the Biden administration’s directive that medical workers have to save pregnant women’s lives, even if doing so requires offering those women abortions. A Trump Environmental Protection Agency will be told to reclassify abortion pills as “forever chemicals,” which will subject them to even tighter regulation. A proposal from one anti-abortion group would mandate that any doctor who prescribes the pills will be tasked with retrieving and disposing of the embryo or fetus post-abortion—an absolutely insane, disgusting, outrageous rule that is wholly impossible to carry out in practice. Some of the groups with Trump’s ear just want him to ban the pills entirely, rolling back FDA approval of one of the safest prescription medications on the market. I don’t see any universe in which Trump would not sign a national abortion ban if one were delivered to him.
Contraception is on the chopping block, too. The first Trump administration cut off Title X funding, the federal dollars for low-income family planning services, to any clinic that so much as told women they had the legal option to end their pregnancies. That will no doubt be repeated if we get Trump II. But the administration may go farther. Anti-abortion groups, including two of the country’s (and a future Trump administration’s) most influential—the Alliance Defending Freedom and Students for Life—have long been laying the groundwork for the argument that the most effective contraceptive methods are actually abortifacients and that “conscience” rules should allow any person the right to refuse providing contraception services. That would include doctors and pharmacists but also employers who provide health insurance plans, an argument that was already affirmed by the Supreme Court in Hobby Lobby. As law professor Mary Ziegler lays out, a core argument in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe was an originalist one that abortion rights do not have a long history of recognition and protection in the United States. Well, the same is true of contraception. And the Supreme Court case that enshrined the right to contraception into law was based on essentially the same legal reasoning as Roe. Which is why I have a really, really difficult time seeing how this conservative Supreme Court could or would uphold the contraception cases after demolishing the entire premise behind them.
Ending the right to contraception would, of course, require a case to go to the Supreme Court. “Pro-life” groups, most of which either oppose contraception or are mum on the issue, realize that their anti-contraception positions are wildly unpopular in a nation in which the vast majority of women use contraception at some point in their lives, and where contraception has led to far fewer maternal and infant deaths, happier marriages, longer-living adults, and freer women and men (most men, like most women, do not wish for a world in which there is a much higher probability that any sex act may trap them into parenthood). So I would not expect today’s anti-abortion movement to prioritize overturning the Constitution protections for contraception—but that’s mostly because they still have many, many more abortion bans to pass.
Still, I do expect them to press Trump to use any authority he has (and authorities he doesn’t have) to make contraception much harder to get. And eventually—perhaps sooner rather than later, because this is not a movement known for its timidity—they will come for the constitutional protections of contraception access. Some of the most influential leaders of these groups, who are now among the chief architects of Trump’s second-term agenda, have been clear that they see ending or radically scaling back contraception access as crucial for their Christian nationalist agenda. Russell Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and remains a top pick for his future chief of staff; he’s also the man drafting many of Trump’s post-2024 plans. And he’s close with former Trump administration official William Wolfe, who shared his suggestions for how to “restore the American family” on Twitter, writing out a neat list:
-End no-fault divorce
-End abortion
-Reduce access to contraceptives
-Require men to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs
-End “sex education” in public schools
-End surrogacy
-Overturn Obergefell
Obergefell is the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage. And some of these same conservative groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, are coming for it.
In other words, those leading Trump’s second-term plans want the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy, governed by biblical principles—that is, biblical principles as these far-right groups interpret them, which also includes putting migrants into internment camps and brutalizing innocents at the U.S. border.
The fundamental goal here is what these right-wing groups call “restoring the American family.” By that they mean enshrining an extreme brand of American patriarchy that has never actually fully existed here. They want to cut off aid to single mothers in an effort to pressure them into marriage. They want to restore a man’s right to be the financial and political head of his household, with his wife and children legally subservient. They want to remove women’s abilities to control our reproduction and determine the number and spacing of our children, because they know that without that ability, we simply cannot be as free as men—cannot pursue education to the same degree, cannot pursue anything in life we might want, will simply be tethered to more-powerful men and see our lives and our futures curtailed. This is also why these same right-wing actors oppose things like no-fault divorce, which enables women and men alike to end unhappy or abusive marriages.
Also on the list: surrogacy, which is certainly ethically and morally complex and worthy of discussion and policy debate, but in the direction of “how do we best protect the world’s vulnerable” and not “how can right-wing psychos best oppress women.” IVF, too, is on the chopping block, because it’s awfully hard to give a fertilized egg a full set of rights and also allow those eggs to continue being created in labs, frozen, and sometimes destroyed.
I don’t know that I even need to mention gender-affirming care, do I? Because obviously that’s under attack from the right, and not just for kids—these right-wing maniacs simply want to diagnose any trans person as mentally ill, and they seek “correction” rather than the basic freedom for adults to decide for themselves how to live. LGBTQ+ rights that are widely popular and that many thought were settled, including basic nondiscrimination rules and the right to same-sex marriage, are also in the right’s crosshairs. And conservative Supreme Court justices are signaling, loud and clear, that they may be open to overturning the case that secured same-sex marriage rights for all Americans. And they may be willing to go even further, putting anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination outside of the bounds of standard anti-discrimination law, including laws that ban gender discrimination.
Does Trump actually care about abortion, contraception, LGBTQ+ rights, or any of this stuff? No, not really. But he does care about securing and maintaining power. And the only people left who are willing to help him do that—and who understand the basic mechanisms of American democracy well enough to break them—are these religious right extremists who are willing to assist Trump in exchange for getting some of what they want. And what they want, more than anything, is the establishment of a firm gender hierarchy with men at the top.
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Birth Control Is Next
At first glance, what’s happening right now in Iowa looks like a rosy vision for the future of reproductive rights.
The Republican-controlled state Senate recently passed a bill that would increase access to certain types of contraception by allowing pharmacists to dispense it to patients without a prescription. Their GOP counterparts in the state House have included a similar provision in a larger health care bill. And Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has indicated that the legislation is one of her top priorities this session.
But look elsewhere in Iowa, and you’ll get a different view. Earlier this month, the state attorney general’s office announced that it would suspend payments for emergency contraception for survivors of sexual assault. The medication had been funded through a program for crime victims, but the Republican attorney general is considering a permanent end to its provision. She is “carefully evaluating whether this is an appropriate use of public funds,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
In other words, counter to a refrain that has taken hold on the left since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, conservatives are not coming for birth control next. They’re coming for birth control now.
Some corners of the right are already in full-blown attack mode. Pulse Life Advocates, one of the Iowa-based anti-abortion groups that is advocating against the over-the-counter contraception bill, states on its website that “contraception kills babies.”
It’s relatively uncommon for an anti-abortion group to state its animus toward birth control so plainly. For years, the major players on the anti-abortion right have claimed to support contraception. They seem to understand that more than 90 percent of Americans are in favor of legal birth control and that most people opposed to abortion likely see contraception as an effective means of reducing demand for it.
In fact, when Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that would codify access to contraception in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, they were met with eye-rolling and denials on the right. “This bill is completely unnecessary. In no way, shape, or form is access to contraception limited or at risk of being limited,” said Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack, during debate on the House floor. “The liberal majority is clearly trying to stoke fears and mislead the American people.” The Democrats were like “the little boy who cried wolf,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
Even among the politically sophisticated and catastrophically cynical, there remains a sense that, since contraception is so widely used and deeply integrated into American life, restrictions on birth control might be too politically unpopular for even far-right Republicans to attempt. About two-thirds of U.S. women of childbearing age use some form of contraception (including female and male sterilization).
But it would be foolish to believe Cammack and Cornyn’s mealy-mouthed reassurances. For one thing, Republicans weren’t willing to write the right to contraception into law: Republican Sen. Joni Ernst blocked the bill before it could come to a vote in the Senate. Conservatives have tried hard to maintain a veneer of rationality on the issue of contraception. But almost a year into the emboldened post-Dobbs anti-abortion movement, the cracks in that facade are starting to show.
Currently, the right to contraception in the U.S. rests on Griswold v. Connecticut, a landmark 1965 Supreme Court decision that is based, as Roe was, on the right to privacy. In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” several precedents that concern the right to privacy—including the legality of gay intimacy, the right to gay marriage, and Griswold. And a growing number of Republicans are willing to state that Griswold was wrongly decided, including Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn and former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters.
But the Supreme Court won’t even have to overturn Griswold for conservatives to curtail access to birth control. Across the country, they are executing a game plan that rests on three strategies: Conflate contraception with abortion, claim that birth control is dangerous to women’s health, and let right-wing judges do their thing.
In Idaho, for example, the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, which passed in 2021, doesn’t just prohibit state-funded student health centers from counseling patients on abortion. It bars them from distributing emergency contraception like Plan B, too.
These legislators are adopting the premise of nearly every anti-abortion group that claims to have no agenda on contraception: Usually, with a coy play on words, they claim that emergency contraception and IUDs—are not contraception at all. They categorize them as methods of abortion.
Anti-abortion advocates argue that pregnancy—and life—begin when an egg is fertilized, even before it has implanted in the uterus. And they say certain kinds of birth control function by preventing a fertilized egg from successfully taking hold in the uterine lining, thus ending an in-progress pregnancy and terminating a human life.
The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, for example, argues that both copper and hormonal IUDs “clearly can cause the death of embryos both before and after implantation” by affecting the lining of the uterus. The website of Americans United for Life says the group takes “no stance on the underlying issue of contraceptive use,” but states elsewhere that people who ingest emergency contraception “take the lives of their unborn children.”
Setting aside the question of whether a free-floating fertilized egg even constitutes a pregnancy, never mind a life, these right-wing claims are untrue: The FDA confirmed in December that Plan B does not work this way, and while the uterine environment created by the copper IUD may be less hospitable to a fertilized egg, this is not its primary method of action—it impedes the motility and viability of sperm, making it difficult and rare for fertilization to occur.
But bad science is a feature, not a bug, of the right-wing approach to reproductive health care. And as usual, Republican lawmakers are taking their cues directly from the most extreme anti-abortion advocacy groups. Two years ago, in Missouri, Republicans tried to ban public funding for IUDs and emergency contraception in a bill that would have made those forms of birth control ineligible for Medicaid coverage. (“Anything that destroys that life is abortion, it’s not birth control,” said the state senator who spearheaded the legislation.) During the 2022 appropriations process in Congress, Rep. Lauren Boebert attempted to bar federal funds from being used on “abortifacient contraceptive drugs,” and Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale proposed adding emergency contraception to a provision prohibiting the federal funding of abortion.
Students for Life, a radical anti-abortion organization that many consider the future of the movement, goes even further than the IUD and Plan B. At the March for Life this January, a spokesperson for the group deflected when I asked her for the group’s position on birth control. “We do not have an official stance on all forms of contraception,” she said. However, the organization’s website classifies all hormonal contraception—including the pill, the patch, the ring, and the hormonal IUD—as abortifacients (contrary to the actual mechanisms of the drugs). It also displays several paragraphs on the health risks of hormonal contraception and discourages its use for other medical conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. “Birth control disrespects women,” it states.
This points to another strategy conservatives are embracing in their mounting efforts to restrict contraceptives: fearmongering about their safety, a time-honored entry in the anti-abortion playbook. In the years before Roe was overturned, GOP-controlled state legislatures imposed superfluous requirements on abortion clinics under the guise of improving patient safety. More recently, right-wing plaintiffs brought a case to an extremist federal judge that claimed, against all available evidence, that the abortion medication mifepristone was too dangerous to have warranted the Food and Drug Administration’s approval in 2000. The judge agreed with those plaintiffs earlier this month, and the Supreme Court determine today whether his ruling will stand.
Groups like the Catholic Medical Association—one of the organizations behind the mifepristone case—are already publicly wringing their hands over the side effects and risks of hormonal contraception. And on conservative TikTok and other social media platforms, there has been a recent uptick in disinformation about contraception, often disguised as #wellness content. Users are spreading false claims that taking the pill can lead to infertility and that the copper IUD can cause copper poisoning.
“That, to me, is really concerning,” said Mara Gandal-Powers, director of birth control access at the National Women’s Law Center. Whether it’s a genuine misreading of the science or a deliberate lie disseminated for political purposes, “it manipulates the public into a place where they may be, three to five years from now, feeling differently about a restriction on contraception that, today, would not fly at all.”
But public buy-in is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, for the anti-abortion right, thanks to its power in the courts. Late last year, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump—the same one who recently moved to invalidate the FDA approval of mifepristone—considered a case brought by a Texas father who argued that Title X, a federal program that provides free contraception, violated his rights as a Christian parent by hypothetically making birth control available to his three adolescent daughters without his consent. The judge agreed, ruling that Texas minors must have parental permission to get contraception at federally funded clinics.
It is possible that Republican lawmakers, with their eyes on reelection, will be less willing to pursue sweeping restrictions on birth control than the federal judges sitting pretty with their lifetime appointments. But the GOP agenda on reproductive health care is already far more radical than public opinion would dictate. Most Americans—including majorities of people in states that have enacted new abortion bans in the wake of Dobbs—opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from pursuing blanket bans in every GOP-controlled legislature in the country.
With contraception, legislators will start the same way they did with abortion: Banning certain types of care, passing parental consent laws, and stripping public funding so that patients on Medicaid lose access to the most effective contraceptives. And why shouldn’t they? It’s worked for them before.
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The anti-abortion plan ready for Trump on Day One
The stakes of the election go far beyond whether a GOP president signs a bill banning the procedure.
The sweeping plans indicate how much conservative activists see a potential Trump administration as an opportunity to restrict abortion nationwide. | Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
Anti-abortion groups have not yet persuaded Donald Trump to commit to signing a national ban if he returns to the White House.
But, far from being deterred, those groups are designing a far-reaching anti-abortion agenda for the former president to implement as soon as he is in office.
In emerging plans that involve everything from the EPA to the Federal Trade Commission to the Postal Service, nearly 100 anti-abortion and conservative groups are mapping out ways the next president can use the sprawling federal bureaucracy to curb abortion access.
Many of the policies they advocate are ones Trump implemented in his first term and President Joe Biden rescinded — rules that would have a far greater impact in a post-Roe landscape. Other items on the wish list are new, ranging from efforts to undo state and federal programs promoting access to abortion to a de facto national ban. But all have one thing in common: They don’t require congressional approval.
“The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told POLITICO. “Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”
The groups have had, at times, a fraught relationship with Trump, who appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade but who has blamed the anti-abortion movement for electoral losses, criticized Florida’s six-week ban and favors exemptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. Yet the sweeping plans indicate how much conservative activists see a potential Trump administration as an opportunity to restrict abortion nationwide — including in states that have voted to protect access over the last two years.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project — a coalition that includes Students for Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations — is drafting executive orders to roll back Biden-era policies that have expanded abortion access, such as making abortions available in some circumstances at VA hospitals. They are also collecting resumes from conservative activists interested in becoming political appointees or career civil servants and training them to use overlooked levers of agency power to curb abortion access.
“We’re trying to do as much, now, of the future president’s work that we can,” Spencer Chretien, a former special assistant to Trump who now runs Project 2025, recently told a packed room at Students for Life’s annual DC conference. “We need our people, our pro-life conservative people across America, to get fired up and to know that help is on the way and that they have something to look forward to.”
The Biden campaign hopes its own voters are similarly fired up, and is highlighting the right’s policy plans as they draw a contrast between Trump and Biden and make abortion rights a leading issue in the presidential election.
“We’ve made such great progress here in the state of Michigan, and yet, it is precarious in the event that Donald Trump comes back to the White House because all that work could be undone,” Biden campaign co-chair and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told POLITICO — referencing her state’s vote in 2022 to overturn a 1931 ban and enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. “We cannot afford to have someone in the White House who is going to rip these rights away that we’ve been fighting so hard to protect.”
In a call with reporters earlier this month, campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez pointed to Project 2025 as a particular threat — arguing that Biden’s policies to advance abortion rights would be in jeopardy if he loses in November and vowing to hammer the message until “every single voter knows it.”
“They have laid out an 887-page blueprint that includes, in painstaking detail, exactly how they plan to leverage virtually every arm, tool and agency of the federal government to attack abortion access,” she said. “Trump’s close advisers have actual plans to block access to abortion in every single state without any help from Congress or the courts.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about its second-term plans for abortion.
But Project 2025, led by Trump administration alumni, along with other conservative activists close to the campaign, said they’re confident Trump would at the very least revive his first-term policies that Biden has since scrapped. That includes reimposing restrictions on domestic and international clinics that provide contraception and STD testing and rolling back access to abortion pills.
Rewriting the rules
The Title X family planning program provides free and subsidized contraception, STD screenings, prenatal care and other services to millions of low-income people around the country.
The Trump administration, in 2019, barred clinics that receive Title X funds from counseling patients about abortion or providing a referral for one, and required clinics that provided both abortion and family planning to construct physically separate facilities and maintain separate staff and finances.
Approximately one-quarter of Title X providers quit the network in protest of the rules, leaving the program with 1,000 fewer sites and 22 percent fewer patients served, according to HHS. Six states lost all Title X providers, while another six lost the vast majority, which the agency estimated led to as many as 181,477 unintended pregnancies.
The Trump rules also allowed faith-based centers that don’t provide or inform patients about their full range of contraceptive options and try to dissuade them from having an abortion to participate in the program and receive federal funding.
Should these policies return with abortion banned or restricted in nearly half the country, the effect could be far greater.
“You are talking about a population that by definition is very low-income and you’d be cutting them off from very basic health care services,” said Usha Ranji, the associate director for women’s health policy at KFF. “The risk of unplanned pregnancies is also completely different post-Dobbs. Title X funds have never been used for abortion services. But providers could once again be prevented from offering comprehensive counseling on all their options, including options that may not be available for great distances.”
Anti-abortion activists are also preparing for a future Trump administration to rescind all the policies Biden enacted that expanded access to both abortion pills and surgical abortions — including funding for military members who must travel across state lines for an abortion, the provision of abortions at VA clinics, the expansion of HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions, and the availability of abortion pills by mail and at retail pharmacies.
“We need to undo all of those,” said Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president of domestic policy who drafted part of the Project 2025 playbook. Speaking at the Students for Life conference, he added the group is “working on those sorts of executive orders and regulations” that will roll back Biden policies and “institutionalize the post-Dobbs environment.”
Undoing many Biden actions would take several months, because the Trump administration would have to propose a new agency rule and allow for public comment before implementation. Several other items on anti-abortion groups’ policy wish list for a Trump administration would also require rulemaking.
Students for Life is pushing for the EPA to classify the chemicals in the abortion pill mifepristone as “forever chemicals” subject to stricter regulations, and to require any doctor who prescribes the pill to be responsible for collecting and disposing of the aborted fetus.
They also want the Federal Trade Commission to penalize and prosecute virtual clinics that prescribe abortion pills to people in states where they are banned.
Susan B. Anthony, an anti-abortion group spending tens of millions of dollars to elect conservative candidates this fall, wants the FDA to reimpose the requirement — lifted by the Biden administration — that abortion pills only be dispensed in-person by a doctor, and investigate non-fatal complications reported by patients who take the drugs. Others want the agency to go further and strip the two-decade-old approval of the pill, banning its sale nationwide.
These regulatory changes would likely face legal challenges. Many rules the Trump administration tried to enact were blocked in court because officials did not follow administrative procedure. But given that experience, the prep work being done by Project 2025 and other groups, and the additional judges appointed by Trump, they would likely have a better success rate in a second term.
“I would anticipate both the very aggressive use of executive authority to undermine access to abortion and a reliance on conservative-leaning courts to lock those executive actions in place,” said Chris Jennings, a health policy expert who worked in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “Even people who think they’re safe because they live in blue states would lose access should that happen.”
Lawmaking by memo
A second Trump administration could make swifter and more sweeping changes by issuing guidance and interpretations of existing laws.
The Comstock Act, passed in the 1870s and named for an official who campaigned against everything from masturbation to women’s suffrage, bans mail delivery of any “lewd or lascivious material,” including any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used for an abortion. The law remains on the books, though its scope has been narrowed by Congress and the courts — for example, it no longer can be used to stop mail delivery of contraception. Project 2025 is preparing for Trump to bring it back into force, cutting off access not only to the pills used in the majority of abortions but also to medical equipment used for abortions and other procedures, and allowing criminal prosecutions of both providers sending the drugs and patients receiving them.
“We believe the Comstock Act should be followed and abortion pills should not be sent through the mail — certainly that should be enforced,” Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee told POLITICO.
The Biden administration’s Justice Department issued a legal memo in December, 2022 arguing that the Comstock Act does not bar mail delivery of abortion medication unless the sender intends for it to be used illegally. But judges appointed by Trump have, since then, ruled the opposite, and GOP state attorneys general have cited Comstock to pressure major pharmacies not to carry the pills in their states.
Groups are also planning for a Trump administration to rescind Biden administration guidance requiring hospitals to offer abortions to patients experiencing medical emergencies regardless of state bans on the procedure — an issue the Supreme Court is set to consider this year.
“The Biden administration has reiterated that stabilizing care includes abortion services and providers need to provide it,” Ranji said. “That could be something the Trump administration could decide not to enforce and they would not even have to go through a rule-making process. They could just do it.”
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Opinion | The right’s war on birth control is already starting
A recent exposé by The New Yorker dropped a bombshell about the organization that may now be the most important in the antiabortion movement: the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian litigation group with a string of Supreme Court wins and a $104 million dollar budget in 2022. Alan Sears, a long-term leader of the group, told the New Yorker of his hopes that one day, Americans would “say the birth control pill is a mistake.”
Sears’ comment contrasts with ADF’s successful public relations strategy: claiming to defend merely the right to conscience of conservative Christians. The history of strategies like the ADF’s make clear that today’s conscience arguments can underwrite future bans, even on birth control itself.
The Dobbs decision has become central to the defense of laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, many of which ADF had a hand in drafting.
Conscience arguments are the most familiar among conscientious objectors to war, but in the 1970s, antiabortion lawyers repurposed them to carve out exemptions for medical professionals who did not want to participate in abortions. At the beginning, these conscience rules enjoyed bipartisan support: a right to conscience resonated with both progressives committed to pluralism and conservatives uncomfortable with legal abortion. But soon, abortion opponents found new uses for these arguments for conscience: Antiabortion lawyers and politicians relied on such arguments to support the Hyde Amendment, a ban on Medicaid reimbursement for abortion. Reimbursing Medicaid patients with taxpayers’ money, they argued, violated the conscience of those with objections to abortion. Their solution: ban all reimbursement for all low-income patients—and suggest that the ban actually helped Medicaid patients by forcing them into a better choice.
ADF is different from the first generation of antiabortion groups: it is openly Christian, and focuses on issues beyond reproduction. It has also made conscience arguments even more central to its work. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, decided in 2018, ADF claimed to defend the religious liberty of a baker who did not wish to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage. In 303 Creative v. Elenis, decided earlier this year, ADF convinced the Supreme Court that the Constitution permitted a Christian website designer to refuse to serve same-sex couples.
Conscience arguments have also transformed legal fights about birth control. ADF played a central role in fighting the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act, which required employers to cover all FDA-approved contraceptives without co-pay. In 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, ADF defended employers who believed that common contraceptives, including IUDs and the morning-after pill, to be abortifacients. The group has framed this cause as a fight for pluralism: just as the law should not force anyone not to use contraception, the law should not force employers to subsidize a pill they believe to kill a rights-holding fetal person.
Sears’ comments show that conscience claims can be the cornerstone of a new conservative incrementalism that erodes access to birth control and lays the groundwork for a future ban. In Hobby Lobby, ADF already created the foundation for this new strategy: suggesting that religious employers had a sound reason for objecting to birth control drugs that might be abortifacients. Other powerful antiabortion groups, like Students for Life, take the same position, suggesting that common forms of birth control actually prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and thus qualify as abortion drugs.
The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the ADF’s work against transgender rights have provided the group with an equally important resource for anti-birth control incrementalism: history and tradition as a limit on constitutional rights. The Dobbs ruling rejected the idea of a right to choose abortion by stressing that it is not deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition, understood to mean the years around 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.
The “history and tradition” argument can apply even to drugs that even abortion opponents may concede are contraceptives.
Dobbs has become central to the defense of laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, many of which ADF had a hand in drafting. Parents who have pushed back against these laws have argued that the Constitution protects parents’ rights to make decisions in their children’s own best interest. Courts sympathetic to ADF responded that after Dobbs, the Constitution recognizes only rights that are deeply rooted in history and tradition—and that because gender-affirming care is new and experimental, there can be no deeply rooted right for parents to seek out that care for their children.
It would not be hard for ADF to make the same argument about birth control in the future. Some abortion opponents will argue that Dobbs already addressed the issue when it comes to many drugs—including the birth control pill—because those drugs count as abortion. But the “history and tradition” argument can apply even to drugs that even abortion opponents may concede are contraceptives. It was in the late nineteenth century, after all, that many states began criminalizing contraception, and that the federal government passed the Comstock Act, which made it a federal crime to mail contraceptives. This kind of evidence convinced the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority that there was no right to abortion. ADF knows that at some later point, similar evidence might convince the Court that there is no right to contraception either.
In the short term, access to birth control is likely to remain unchanged. In the longer term, however, ADF has made clear that it is far from safe. And anyone looking to predict how the attack on it will unfold knows just where to look: fights about sexual orientation, gender identity and the right to conscience.
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Gavin Newsom launches red-state abortion ads over ‘war on travel’
The Democratic governor from California lobbed his latest salvo against conservatives who are trying to further restrict abortions by imposing new bans on out-of-state travel.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new ad, which debuted Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” will air in Tennessee, where a state representative is trying to outlaw transporting a minor for an abortion. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday broadened his incursion into red America, unveiling the first in a series of TV ads that accuses conservative officials of holding women hostage by imposing restrictions on their travel for reproductive care.
Newsom’s new ad, which debuted Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” will air in Tennessee, where a state representative is trying to outlaw transporting a minor for an abortion. Under the Tennessee proposal, adults who engage in “ abortion trafficking” — helping pregnant minors get the procedure out-of-state without parental permission — could be charged with a felony that carries up to 15 years in prison.
The new TV spot in Tennessee, part of an initial six-figure buy on broadcast, cable and digital platforms that will expand to more red states, shows a distressed young woman handcuffed to a hospital gurney and pleading for help. The voiceover says “Trump Republicans” want to criminalize young women who travel for reproductive care.
“Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage,” the narrator says, urging viewers to take action and directing viewers to a website. The site currently includes a petition against abortion travel bans and once the state-by-state campaigns launch, will include ways for people to take action against the legislation.
Several red-state officials are moving swiftly to impose fines and legal penalties for transporting people seeking abortions over state lines. Newsom, who previously ran abortion-related TV spots and billboards and pushed to make California a legal “sanctuary” for abortions, said the conditions in conservative states are “much more pernicious than they even appear.”
“These guys are not just restricting the rights, self-determination to bear a child for a young woman,” Newsom, a Democrat and top Biden campaign surrogate, said on the Sunday program. “But they’re also determining their fate as it relates to their future in life by saying they can’t even travel.”
He pointed to Tennessee, as well as Oklahoma and Mississippi, and said the attorney general in Alabama wants to criminalize travel not just for children, but for adults seeking reproductive care. The latter refers to a court filing that described out-of-state abortion travel as “criminal conspiracy.”
“That’s how serious this moment is,” Newsom added. “And we need to be even more aggressive, I would argue. And that’s what this ad represents.”
Protecting abortion access is a central pillar in Democrats’ efforts to retain the White House and win down-ballot this fall. Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created through IVF are considered children under state law. While former President Donald Trump disagreed with that ruling, he has expressed support for a 16-week abortion ban.
Newsom’s latest move comes from his Campaign for Democracy, a committee he seeded with millions of dollars in donations leftover from a failed recall of him in 2021. It also focuses on gun control. Running ads far outside California has become a familiar move by the governor, who has bolstered his national profile through high-profile fights with Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Newsom rented billboards in several Republican-led states. The ambitious governor made another unorthodox play ahead of the midterm election last fall, eschewing ads for his own, easy reelection effort and instead pouring millions of dollars into TV spots for 2022’s Proposition 1, a measure that enshrined the right to abortion and contraceptives in California’s constitution.
Last year, Newsom led a network of Democratic governors in 20 states, dubbed the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the court’s Dobbs decision.
California has nevertheless struggled to increase access to abortion within its own borders.
Newsom’s post-Roe abortion foray began with criticism of his own party for not being aggressive enough about what he calls a “rights regression” led by the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. He said in the interview that aired Sunday that the high court set the tone for the debate and that the current situation is “not just a war on travel.”
“It’s not just a war on reproductive healthcare,” Newsom said. “It’s also a war on women more broadly defined, including, as we know, contraceptives.”
While he was initially critical of his own party, drawing the ire of the White House, Newsom said its leaders are now responding with more force. He credited President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made prioritizing abortion access a centerpiece of her portfolio, with leading that fight.
“We’ve defined the lines of this debate,” Newsom said. “We’ve been on the offense, not on the defense. The Republican Party is on the defense on this issue.”
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