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Control, Punish, Surveil: The Multi-Front Attack on Reproductive Rights

The headlines keep circling back to Trump—but we’re missing the bigger picture. This week, we’re zooming in on recent attacks on reproductive care at every level. As we’ve emphasized throughout our newsletter series, fascism isn’t just about an authoritarian President in Washington, nor does its reach only extend to the courts and Congress. Fascism also finds a home in hospitals, pharmacies, and jail cells. It’s a school nurse afraid to help. A prosecutor who sees a miscarriage as probable cause. A hospital lawyer overriding a doctor’s judgment.

Yes, Trump’s attacks on democracy are dangerous. But focusing solely on him lets state and local governments off the hook for quietly advancing the same agenda, often with more immediate and devastating consequences. When the federal government withdraws protection, it creates a vacuum that state and local actors are eager to fill with punitive laws and carceral logic. And that’s what we’re now seeing across the country. The throughline is clear: control, punish, and surveil. That’s why this week, we’re spotlighting reproductive care–not just as a health issue, but as a frontline in the broader struggle for bodily autonomy, democratic freedom, and resistance to creeping authoritarianism.

Let’s connect those dots.

Federal attacks on reproductive care:

  • Funding Freeze for Title X grant recipients: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced in April that it would withhold funds from 16 organizations, threatening close to $66 million in funding for Title X, the country’s sole federally funded family planning program. Title X allocates more than $200 million annually for clinics that provide health care services like birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing for low-income people.

Now, only a couple of months later, we are seeing the impacts of that freeze: at least twenty Planned Parenthood clinics have already shuttered and many other grantees who provide reproductive health care are similarly on the chopping block. Across the country–from Montana to Mississippi– dozens of providers are struggling to stay afloat and are grappling with hard decisions that may jeopardize patient health.

  • Trump’s EMTALA rollback: Earlier this month, the Trump administration rescinded Biden-era guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care under EMTALA. The move ratchets up the administration’s earlier decision to drop the government’s litigation efforts to enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) against Idaho.

EMTALA requires hospitals to provide immediate, life-saving treatment to all patients with emergency medical conditions. Chipping away at EMALTA not only places pregnant people who are suffering medical emergencies at risk, but it also leaves physicians and hospitals in anti-abortion states without clear federal protection, setting the stage for large-scale medical neglect.

  • Are embryos people? On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that assigns gender and personhood “at conception,” alarming advocates who fear that this language is another step forward in enshrining fetal personhood into law. If that happens, abortion would be outlawed across the nation and could be criminalized as murder.

The local consequences:

State legislators and law enforcement are weaponizing the criminal legal system in three critical ways to curtail abortion access:  

The widened criminal net has already had ripple effects:

  • Denying life-saving medical care: In Texas, Kyleigh Thurman was twice discharged while experiencing a dangerous ectopic pregnancy. She bled heavily at home before being treated—risking her life and fertility. She’s not alone. And at least in Georgia, an abortion ban may also mean denying medical care even in death.  
  • Digital Surveillance: A police officer in Texas used a database of  video footage from 83,000 security cameras from across the country to look for a woman who he believed had self-aborted.  The officers allegedly reviewed video from cameras where abortion is legal.

What’s happening in your jurisdiction/on your beat?

  • Subscribe to Abortion, Every Day: Jessica Valenti writes an essential daily newsletter with comprehensive tracking of abortion-related legislation, court battles, and political developments, while offering crucial context and analysis.
  • Follow the hospitals: Are ERs in your region now turning patients away out of legal fear? What training (or lack of it) are staff receiving under EMTALA uncertainty?
  • Look into your DA’s office: Are local prosecutors emboldened by these state-level laws? Are pregnancy outcomes being quietly criminalized near you?
  • Trace the pills: Mifepristone and misoprostol restrictions are the next battleground. Who’s enforcing them? Who’s resisting?

What to watch for:

  • How other states may follow Louisiana’s lead on reclassifying mifepristone and misoprostol.
  • Whether the FDA responds to Democratic AGs’ petition to remove restrictions on mifepristone.
  • Litigation efforts across the country to challenge criminalization and refusal of care.
  • Is Missouri the litmus test? Or does Michigan offer hope? Conservative lawmakers across the country are racing to override amendments that were passed by voters to affirm reproductive rights.  

Some good news:

  • Maryland, a state that protects abortion as a constitutional right, has now established a first-of-its kind abortion fund that will allow it to continue to serve as a Post-Dobbs safe haven for those seeking reproductive care—residents and out-of-staters alike.  
  • Three Democratic Congressmembers just introduced the “my body, my data” bill, which aims to block companies from accessing online users’ reproductive health data.
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