The Midterms Aren’t Stopping the Anti-Abortion Movement—Even as Trump Tries to Shut Everyone Up
Days after Trump stepped into the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, the federal government wiped its post-Roe reproductive rights fact sheet from the internet; revived a global gag order on delivering aid to any international health organization that even mentions abortion; and picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—a position he’s since used to revive measles, endanger pregnant people, and endorse Big Poison.
In the months since, and emboldened by Trump in office, more states began surveilling abortion seekers. More states attempted to pass legislation that would charge abortion as homicide. And more state lawmakers (and more than a dozen attorneys general) have continued to amplify junk science to get the abortion pill banned. Further, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill (thanks for nothing, Sen. Murkowski) served as a backdoor to defund Planned Parenthood, as well as smaller clinics, like Maine Family Planning. Jezebel’s (Bleak) 2025 Reproductive Rights Guide predicted most of this.
“There’s not a lot of change in the expectations for 2026,” Jennifer Driver, Senior Director of Reproductive Rights at State Innovation Exchange (SiX), told Jezebel in January, saying she anticipates “even more dark and dire” legislation.
But, since it’s a midterm year, what is changing is the Trump administration’s approach to abortion—namely, trying desperately to evade the topic of abortion rights altogether. Meanwhile, congressional GOPers like anti-abortion Slenderman Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) seem unconcerned about muting their agenda to preserve the party’s slipping trifecta.
In less than 14 months, there’s been dirty tricks; broken promises; horrific medical setbacks; and far too much of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—who monitors porn intake with his son. Through it, we defended the safety of mifepristone a gazillion times, and we’ll say it again: mifepristone, the first of two supplements taken for a medication abortion, is safe.
And the consequences of abortion bans are no longer theoretical. In April, a hospital in Georgia turned a brain-dead woman into a live incubator because she was pregnant, and the hospital wasn’t sure what to do because of the state’s abortion ban.
Just as we did last year, we’re breaking down how your rights are being further eroded in 2026—and how the midterms have raised the stakes even higher. Strap in.
More abortion-related ballot measures
There’s a lot going on but a constitutional amendment to reinstate Missouri’s abortion ban this fall is polling at 47-40 because Republicans cynically slapped on a gender-affirming care ban. me in @autonomynews.co
— Susan Rinkunas (@susanrinkunas.com) March 24, 2026 at 4:37 PM
In 2024, 10 states had abortion-related measures on their ballot, with seven voting in favor of abortion rights. This year, at least four states—Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia—will be voting on abortion rights in November.
And Missouri is already a mess. After voters enshrined abortion rights in 2024, anti-abortion activists are now attempting to undo it with a deliberately confusing new Amendment 3. A state appeals court even had to rewrite the language after finding it misleading.
“They did this because they know that abortion has proved to be popular, and that was the only way that they could,” Mallory Schwarz, the executive director at Abortion Action Missouri, told Jezebel. “We feel it’s a road ahead for sure, but we feel confident that in 2026 voters will again vote in favor of abortion access and reproductive freedom, and we will defeat this new abortion ban on the ballot.”
Btw, Republicans know abortion is a winning issue for Dems: In Missouri, the GOP is trying to pass an abortion ban by calling it Amendment 3 in order to trick voters!
There’s a reason that Republicans are co-opting pro-choice messaging or running from the issue
— Jessica Valenti (@jessicavalenti.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Virginia will be voting on a constitutional amendment called the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment” that would add to its Article 1 a “Section 11-A,” which would codify Virginians’ legal right to abortion. And Nevada will be voting on a constitutional amendment, or its “Question 6 Right to Abortion Initiative,” which would establish the right to abortion until fetal viability (typically around 24 weeks’ gestation), or to protect the life of the mother.
Anti-abortionists are doubling down on their platform
Thousands of anti-abortion activists convened on the National Mall on Friday for the March for Life, the rally held every January since 1974 to protest Roe v. Wade. This year, for the first time, they were there to celebrate its demise. https://t.co/2Pi1UtWAJD pic.twitter.com/WulukJ2wYu
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2023
In November, anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America pledged $80 million towards campaigning for anti-abortion candidates in Iowa, Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina, with plans to impact at least a dozen competitive House districts.
“These anti abortion groups are extremely well-funded,” Ryan Stitzlein, Vice President of Political and Government Relations at Reproductive Freedom For All, said. “There has been zero indication that they are slowing down.”
Still, abortion access remains popular among Americans, and in 2025, four of the states that voted for Trump passed constitutional amendments to enshrine abortion access. If only they could understand that if Trump ever decides to pass a federal abortion ban, their vote to enshrine abortion access wouldn’t mean anything…
The Trump administration will do the opposite
Publicly, the White House will continue downplaying its anti-abortion agenda until after the midterms.
In January, the Justice Department asked a federal court to stall a Louisiana lawsuit targeting mifepristone—by claiming that the FDA is already conducting its own review, and that the case would double-up the efforts and undercut the work of the Trump administration. (Translation: they panicked.) Louisiana pushed forward anyway, seeking an injunction.
The same month, Trump told Republicans to “be flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which was passed in 1976 and prohibits federal funding for abortion. Stitzlein explains that while Trump’s comments refer to Hyde within the context of the Affordable Care Act, it was a deliberate effort to rail against abortion access without explicitly saying it.
“Trump and the people closest to him understand that this is a political liability,” Stitzlein explains. “He is aware of the political toxicity of their position, but the Republican congressional response to that, it shows the opposite.”
We saw all this skirting and dodging during the 2024 election: Trump got angry at reporters for asking him about abortion; JD Vance tried to rebrand a federal abortion ban as a “minimum national standard”; and even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)—historically a big fan of abortion bans—evaded questions and snapped at a moderator during a debate.
Planned Parenthood is facing ongoing attacks
Laurel Sakai, the National Director of Public Policy at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Jezebel in January what the state-of-play is at PP, six months on from Trump signing his (evil) spending bill into law in July, which included a “defund provision” and barred any nonprofit that provides abortion services and receives $800,000 more in federal funding from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for one year. The provision—which never explicitly mentions PP—has since posed various existential challenges to family planning clinics.
One of these clinics was Maine Family Planning, which had to close three of its locations in the fall. Other centers affected included ones in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington. An estimated 10 million people also lost Medicaid coverage because of the bill.
In July, Maine Family Planning sued the Trump administration over the bill.
“From July to September, Planned Parenthood health centers were able to see over 100,000 patients despite not getting that reimbursement,” Sakai says, adding that the provision could precede something worse. “We’ve certainly seen from their base the interest in making this permanent, and commitment from them to continue doing everything they can to make it harder for primary health centers to operate.”
The fetal personhood movement is gaining ground
The fetal personhood movement—which seeks to establish embryos and fetuses as separate, living entities from the person carrying them—had an unfortunately productive year in 2025. Twelve states introduced legislation to classify abortion as homicide. None passed—but that’s not the point. Legal experts suggest that introducing these bills at all shifts the Overton window and further emboldens the movement.
“They’re targeting the definition of what is the person, and what rights apply to a pregnancy,” Nimra Chowdhry, senior state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says.
“It’s a very intentional attempt to mislead the public,” Gabriella Watson, a senior policy associate with Pregnancy Justice, also tells Jezebel. “So like child tax credits for the unborn, or child support [that] starts at conception, even some [rules] that might seem innocuous, like allowing pregnant people to drive in HOV lanes claiming that the fetus counts as a person…It’s really intentional with the idea to socialize the idea that fetuses an embryo should have rights.”
Since Dobbs, Pregnancy Justice has recorded more than 400 instances of people facing criminal charges for any offense associated with pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth.
More bogus science
In September, FDA chair Marty Makary officially announced a review into mifepristone because of a bogus study amplified by Hawley (R-Mo.), more than 20 GOP attorneys general, and a bunch of other idiot GOP lawmakers.
The study will probably be as fodder-filled and misleading as the paper that Hawley keeps pointing to as proof that the abortion pill is dangerous. But it wasn’t peer-reviewed, was conducted by the far-right EPPC, and has been denounced by over 200 medical experts. In September, it was reported that Makary is dragging his feet until after the midterms, which pissed off Hawley—so he introduced his own bill to ban the abortion pill.
Nonsense. Millions of women have used mifepristone & it’s safe & effective for the vast majority. Nowhere near 1 in 10 users are “severely physically harmed.https://t.co/AYe5xBTrwZ https://t.co/N23j8OFFbS
— Liz Highleyman (@LizHighleyman) January 23, 2026
“This is happening in a black box,” Senior Counsel at the CFRR Amy Myrick says. “We don’t really know what they’re doing, what evidence they’re relying on, who they’re listening to—and because of that, we’ve had to bring a lawsuit just to get more information, which should never happen any time a major decision is being made about a medication or something else.”
Telehealth abortion is booming—and under attack
June will mark four years since Roe was overturned, but obviously, bans have not stopped people from needing essential and sometimes, life-saving abortion care. At the end of 2025, the Society of Family Planning released new #WeCount data, which has tracked abortions since 2022, and found that telehealth abortions accounted for 27% of abortions for the first half of last year—a huge jump from 5% in Spring 2022. As such, “2026 promises to be a pivotal year for medication abortion access,” says Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
Sen Hassan correctly pointing out that telehealth exists BECAUSE of abortion ban states and physicians fleeing those states. Patients would have to drive hundreds of miles to see a doctor.
— Laura Chapin (@laurachapin.bsky.social) January 14, 2026 at 9:15 AM
“Knowledge and use of abortion pills by mail will continue to increase,” predicts Elisa Wells, a co-founder at Plan C. And while she expects other challenges—such as the “online censorship of information about access and disruptions in search caused by AI and Big Tech’s policies”—to throw a spanner in the works, abortion seekers will continue to benefit from the telehealth model. “Experience in the United States and elsewhere suggests that access to abortion pills by mail is unstoppable.”
More attacks on shield laws
And more attacks on telehealth abortions mean more attacks on shield laws—which allow doctors in blue states to provide abortion care (i.e., prescribing abortion pills) to anyone in abortion-banned states. Shield laws have quickly become one of the top targets of the anti-abortion movement—especially as telehealth abortions accounted for about 91,000 abortions in 2025. But they’re mostly failing.
Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Texas), for example, has suffered repeated failures in his dogged pursuit of the New York-based Dr. Margaret Carpenter for allegedly sending abortion pills to Texas, home to one of the strictest bans in the country. Since New York—like 21 other states and Washington, DC—has a shield law in place, Paxton was shot down three times throughout the year before appearing to drop the lawsuit altogether.
The anti-abortion AG evidently hasn’t learned his lesson and filed a new lawsuit against Delaware-based nurse practitioner Dr. Debra Lynch this year, also for allegedly sending abortion pills into Texas. Laughably, the latest case cites no specific instance, but just calls her a drug trafficker and points out she’s spoken about servicing Texas to media outlets before.
I hope Ken Paxton [REDACTED]
— Super Nintendo Chalmers (@snchalmers.bsky.social) January 29, 2026 at 5:02 PM
Reproductive Futures Founder and CEO Julie F. Kay—who helped draft some shield laws at the state level, such as New York’s—says that while these laws have enacted a “quiet revolution,” there are plenty of fights ahead. “[We anticipate] more attempts by private individuals to try to impede shield law provision from supportive states in cases predominantly brought by estranged male partners and abortion opponents who are using Texas’ hostile and specious new law HB7,” a grim law that declares open season on anyone who wants to send abortion pills into the state. (In February, a Texas man who was already suing his girlfriend for receiving abortion pills from a California doctor updated his lawsuit to try and cash in on the bounty.) “Nonetheless, shield laws have stood strong against civil and criminal charges already.”
More attacks on birth control
“We definitely don’t think birth control is safe,” Gretchen Borchelt, Vice President of Reproductive Rights and Health at the National Women’s Law Center, tells Jezebel.
She points out that the administration could attempt to eliminate emergency contraception and mail-order condoms from the Affordable Care Act—a goal outlined by Project 2025—or replace and remove “expert panels” that make the guidelines around birth control.
For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently appointed Dr. John Littell to the state’s Board of Medicine—a “doctor” who got disbarred from the American Board of Family Medicine and who believes birth control has “done more damage to women than any single drug ever created by mankind.” Speaking at a Florida Senate committee hearing in March, he accused the medication of “stripping” young women’s fertility.
OK GOP is attacking birth control. We have said this time and time again. Republicans want to ban contraception! https://t.co/dYKlVZDh7K
— Allison Chapman (@AlliRaine22) February 17, 2024
“We haven’t seen the frontal attacks on birth control that we may have expected, given that Justice [Clarence] Thomas invited people to bring a case to him that would overturn Griswold,” she continued, but “they’ve been following the anti-abortion playbook of chipping away and going after birth control in various ways.”
GOP Attorneys General will continue expanding their mandate
AGs were never meant to shape or make policy, but that hasn’t stopped anti-abortion AGs like Paxton, who at this point might as well tattoo his forehead with a reminder of how the Constitution works.
“AGs now don’t just enforce abortion laws,” Driver says. “They are deciding how much risk doctors are willing to take. They’re acting less like state officials and more like these coordinated national enforcement networks to restrict care, and so they really kind of become the primary architect, the enforcer of our abortion abortion restrictions, especially when it comes to telehealth.”
Texas has been the ground zero for extremist state officials to use laws to target and harass individuals and providers, Borchelt explains. “They are looking like casting about to try and find whatever kind of excuse they can to bring new challenges, to harass and to try to bankrupt providers, organizations, and they think they have friendly courts now to do it, and that they’ll be successful.”
Also in December, North Dakota’s Marty Jackley (R) filed a cease-and-desist tantrum over a telehealth company’s gas station ads; in February, Louisiana’s Liz Murrill (R) compared abortion pills to fentanyl and guns; and for all of her six-month tenure, Missouri’s Catherine Hanaway (also R) has done everything her predecessors did before her—and continued to wage war on medication abortions.
As Borchelt put it, all this tumult really just “proves the point” that overturning Roe resolved no issue in any way, and removing federal protection has “made everybody less safe and more chaotic.”
It’s all in Project 2026
And while you’ve heard of Project 2025, Sakai says there’s a Project 2026 just like it.
It uses fewer words but also has broader concepts of continuing to restrict abortion access. In one of these policies, titled “Put Family First,” the Heritage Foundation commits itself to “advanc[ing] policies at the state and federal level to restore the nuclear family to the center of American life and to reduce both the demand and supply for abortion at all stages of human development.” This is harsher language than in Project 2025.
“I would not be surprised if they aren’t as vocal about it in their campaigns,” Sakai told Jezebel. “[When] they’re given the opportunity, when they are in power,” Sakai says. “They will do everything they can to come after sexual reproductive health and abortion care.”