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abortion bans
Trump's Anti-Trans Order Could Pave Way for National Abortion Ban
"They are going to try to sneak in that fetal personhood language anywhere they can, anywhere and everywhere," said advocate and author Jessica Valenti.
Jan 23, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have insisted that the White House would not sign a nationwide abortion ban—despite the latter's expression of support for one as recently as 2022—but an unrelated executive order Trump signed this week may put the country on the path to outlawing abortion care without the president needing to sign any legislation into law.
Reproductive rights advocates including author Jessica Valenti noticed shortly after Trump signed an executive order stating the government will not recognize transgender people that the document included language that was unmistakably linked to the right-wing push for "fetal personhood" laws.
"'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell," reads the executive order signed on Monday. "'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell."
Aside from the fact that the order suggests the Trump administration will recognize everyone born in the United States as a female—because in the first weeks after conception, explained one 2001 scientific paper, "fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female"—the document claims that a fetus is a "person" from the moment of conception.
"And so it begins," said Valenti after the executive order was issued. "They are going to try to sneak in that fetal personhood language anywhere they can, anywhere and everywhere."
The order's language is in line with the Republican Party's 2024 platform, which did not call for a nationwide abortion ban but expressed support for states that would establish fetal personhood by extending the protections of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that "no person can be denied life or liberty without due process," to fetuses.
The Texas Republican Party last year asserted in its platform that "abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide," and said the party would push to extend "equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization."
Rights advocates have warned that adoption of the fetal personhood doctrine at the national level could ultimately lead to the prosecution of pregnant people who obtain abortion care—something anti-abortion groups have long claimed they wouldn't support.
When the national GOP platform was released last August, Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern said its language suggested that "the GOP has recognized that this task is too unpopular to enact democratically, so they're outsourcing it to the federal courts."
"Fetal personhood means a nationwide abortion ban imposed by judicial fiat," said Stern.
Anti-abortion advocates aim to ultimately bring fetal personhood to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping the right-wing majority would rule that the 14th Amendment applies to fetuses from the moment of conception.
Including a reference to fetal personhood in an unrelated executive order is "an intentional way to continue to normalize the idea that embryos are people," Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, told The Guardian.
"This is yet another attempt to codify it in one form or another," said Sussman.
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Federal Court Rules Idaho Can Enforce So-Called 'Abortion Trafficking' Law
"If legislators were trying to trap men in states where they couldn't get healthcare, we would never hear the end of it," said one advocate.
Dec 03, 2024
Nearly two years after it was first proposed by Republican lawmakers, an Idaho law that, as one rights advocate said, essentially "traps" people in the state to stop them from getting abortion care, was permitted to go into effect on Monday after a federal appeals court ruling.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Idaho can prohibit people from "harboring or transporting" a minor who needs to leave the state to obtain an abortion, which is still legal in the surrounding states of Oregon, Washington, and Montana.
The law, originally proposed as House Bill 242, makes the so-called crime of "abortion trafficking" punishable by two to five years in prison, even if the pregnant person obtains an abortion in a state where the procedure is legal.
The law was blocked in its entirety in late 2023 by a judge who found it violated First Amendment rights, because it also included a ban on "recruiting" teenagers to obtain abortion care across state lines.
The appeals court on Monday found that the "recruitment" portion of the law did violate the constitutional right to free speech because it could be applied to anything "from encouragement, counseling and emotional support; to education about available medical services and reproductive healthcare; to public advocacy promoting abortion care and abortion access."
"Encouragement, counseling and emotional support are plainly protected speech under Supreme Court precedent," wrote Judge M. Margaret McKeown, an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton, in the majority opinion.
"Republicans want to scare anyone who might help teens access abortion—whether it's a beloved grandmother or a local abortion fund."
Wendy Heipt, an attorney representing the Northwest Abortion Access Fund and the Indigenous Idaho Alliance as well as a lawyer and advocate who sued the state over the law, said the portion of the ruling regarding "recruitment" was a "significant victory for the plaintiffs, as it frees Idahoans to talk with pregnant minors about abortion healthcare."
But Jessica Valenti, a writer and advocate who writes the Substack newsletter Abortion, Every Day, said efforts to establish traveling for abortion care as a crime should be "front page news every single day."
"If legislators were trying to trap men in states where they couldn't get healthcare, we would never hear the end of it," wrote Valenti.
Republicans in Idaho have pushed the law as one that would "stop adults from taking minors across state lines for abortions without parental permission," Valenti added. "In truth, the law criminalizes helping a teenager obtain an abortion in any capacity—anywhere."
She continued that the ban's "sweeping language... could send someone to prison as a 'trafficker' for lending a teen gas money."
"That's the point, of course: Republicans want to scare anyone who might help teens access abortion—whether it's a beloved grandmother or a local abortion fund," wrote Valenti. "They're targeting the helpers."
Tennessee Republicans have also passed an "abortion trafficking" law, but a court blocked it from being enforced in September, with U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger writing that the state had "chosen to outlaw certain communications in furtherance of abortions that are, in fact, entirely legal."
"It is, therefore, a basic constitutional fact—which Tennessee has no choice but to accept—that as long as there are states in which abortion is permissible, then abortion will be potentially available to Tennesseans," added Trauger.
Republicans in Mississippi, Alabama, and Oklahoma have introduced similar legislation, while Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has suggested states can restrict pregnant residents' travel.
Valenti wrote that Monday's ruling "is not just about Idaho" and that laws barring travel for abortion care will not "stop with teenagers."
"Young people are the canaries in the coal mine," she wrote. "What happens to them today comes for us all tomorrow."
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Georgia Woman's Death Marks First Confirmed Case of Fatal Post-Roe Abortion Denial
Amber Nicole Thurman's death "is the logical outcome of the Georgia abortion ban working exactly as intended by horrifically punishing women who try to access abortion care," said one advocate.
Sep 17, 2024
Reproductive rights advocates have warned for years that abortion bans and restrictions like those now in place in 22 U.S. states would kill pregnant people, and have been dismissed as "hyperbolic" by right-wing lawmakers and activists.
On Monday, new reporting shed light for the first time on the case of one woman whose "preventable" death was the result of an abortion ban—and as ProPublica reported, "there are almost certainly others."
The outlet reported on the story of Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother of a six-year-old son in Georgia, who realized she was pregnant in July 2022—weeks after the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and just as the state's six-week abortion ban was going into effect.
Thurman had just passed the six-week mark in her pregnancy as the ban took effect on July 20, with "exceptions" that Republicans claimed would allow doctors to provide care to pregnant people who were facing life-threatening complications.
Unable to get an abortion in her home state, the medical assistant, who was planning to attend nursing school and had recently been able to move out of her family's home into an apartment with her son, scheduled a dilation and curettage (D&C)—a surgical abortion procedure—at a clinic in North Carolina, about four hours away. Scheduling the appointment required taking the day off work, finding childcare, and borrowing a relative's car.
Thurman hit heavy traffic on the way to the clinic and missed her appointment; with abortion bans going into effect across the Southeast, the facility was overwhelmed with out-of-state patients and was unable to schedule another D&C for her.
Instead, she was prescribed the abortion pills misoprostol and mifepristone, and took the first pill before heading back home with plans to take the second in Georgia.
After taking the second pill, however, Thurman experienced a rare complication, with some of the fetal tissue remaining in her uterus.
Before Georgia's abortion ban went into effect, she would have been able to obtain a D&C, with doctors removing the remaining tissue—a fairly routine procedure, and part of the standard care for a miscarriage.
As ProPublica reported, the year after the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, affirming that abortion care was a constitutional right in the U.S., the new availability of D&Cs for abortion and miscarriages slashed the maternal mortality rate for women of color by up to 40%.
But when Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in the Atlanta suburb of Stockbridge—having experienced increasing pain and heavy bleeding before vomiting blood and fainting—she encountered a medical team that delayed providing her the standard care for roughly 20 hours.
ProPublica noted that the "supposed lifesaving exceptions" in Georgia's six-week abortion ban prohibit doctors from using medical instruments "with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy," and specify that procedures such as a D&C can only be used if fetal tissue needs to be removed due to a "spontaneous abortion"—the medical term for a miscarriage.
Thurman had told the doctors that she had had a medication abortion, which Republican state lawmakers hadn't included in the exceptions—suggesting she shouldn't be provided care since she'd chosen to terminate her pregnancy. Violating the law could result in prosecution and a prison sentence of up to a decade for a doctor.
The morning after Thurman arrived at the hospital at around 9:30 pm on August 18, 2022, with an ultrasound showing fetal tissue remaining in Thurman's body, a doctor diagnosed "acute severe sepsis," but it was still hours before the staff provided care to remove the tissue.
According to ProPublica:
By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.
[...]
At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit.
At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs.
At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating.
Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.
By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area—a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.
During surgery, Thurman's heart stopped.
The state's maternal mortality review board, which includes 10 physicians, determined that the hospital's decision to delay providing care for nearly an entire day had a "large" impact on Thurman's "preventable" death.
ProPublica identified one other Georgia woman whose death was caused by delayed abortion care resulting from the state's ban, and plans to report on her story in the coming days.
"This is what abortion bans do," said writer and activist Jessica Valenti.
At The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that "it was only a matter of time" before Americans would learn that an abortion ban had killed a pregnant person.
"The shattering fallout from abortion prohibition was entirely predictable for anyone who has paid attention to such bans in other countries," Goldberg wrote, citing the 2012 case in Ireland of Savita Halappanavar, who died of septicemia after doctors refused to treat her for a miscarriage because her fetus still had a heartbeat.
"In Ireland, the name Savita became a rallying cry" that led voters to overwhelmingly approve a referendum making abortion legal, wrote Goldberg. "The name Amber should be one here."
On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, addressed Thurman's story, saying her death is "exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down."
"This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school," said Harris. "Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again... And now women are dying. These are the consequences of [Republican candidate] Donald Trump's actions."
A spokesperson for Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's office dismissed the medical board's finding that Thurman's death could have been prevented if not for the state's abortion ban, telling ProPublica that the law allows doctors to provide care in medical emergencies and calling the outlet's reporting a "fear-mongering campaign."
But Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of progressive advocacy group Indivisible, said Thurman death "was not a tragic mistake."
"It is the logical outcome of the Georgia abortion ban working exactly as intended," said Greenberg, "by horrifically punishing women who try to access abortion care."
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