Inside the Global Network of Abortion Doulas Supporting Self-Managed Care

A global infrastructure is emerging to guide people through self-managed abortions, reshaping how pregnancies are ended.

1/26/2025
by Carrie N. Baker, Ms. Magazine

As barriers to clinic-based abortion care increase, a growing number of women are self-managing their abortions: finding and using abortion pills independently of the formal medical system—usually through online abortion pill services, community networks sharing pills for free or websites selling pills.

To support self-managed abortion, feminists are creating a global network of online abortion doulas—trained companions who offer one-on-one support by phone, email and text to people using abortion pills. A leader in this effort is the organization Rouge Doulas, which runs the Rouge Abortion Doula School.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/26/rouge-abortion-pills-doula-support-health/

It Is Sacred Work’: Abortion Clinics Are Stepping Up After the Fall of Roe

Organizations across the country are ensuring people continue to have access to reproductive care.

by Eleanor J. Bader
November 25, 2025

In the first 100 days after the June 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, sixty-six health clinics in fifteen states stopped providing surgical abortions, and fourteen states enacted near-total bans on the procedure.

But then something unexpected happened. By 2024, twenty-one new facilities had opened in states where abortion was not completely banned, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Moreover, KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) reports that by 2023, 226 virtual providers—including online pharmacies, feminist health centers, and help lines—had set up shop to counsel people seeking abortion services and provide abortion medication through the mail.

Continued: https://progressive.org/latest/it-is-sacred-work-abortion-clinics-are-stepping-up-after-the-fall-of-roe-bader-20251125/

New York Times’ Shameful Reporting on Planned Parenthood Bolsters Right-Wing Attacks on Reproductive Healthcare Access

Why is the New York Times publishing scurrilous accusations against Planned Parenthood while ignoring the $1.7 billion unregulated antiabortion pregnancy center industry that endangers the lives of American women and girls?

PUBLISHED 2/21/2025
by Carrie N. Baker and Jenifer McKenna

The New York Times published a 3,000-word investigative report recently, claiming to have found “scores of allegations” against Planned Parenthood for misconduct, medical malpractice, mismanagement and labor violations. Released within a month of Trump’s inauguration and published on the front page of the Sunday print edition above the fold, the article appears timed to provide ammunition for the ongoing right-wing attacks on reproductive rights.

The New York Times has piled onto Trump’s executive orders obliterating reproductive rights for many Americans and his pardons of antiabortion terrorists who invaded and blocked reproductive health clinics, Republicans’ baseless lawsuits meant to bankrupt Planned Parenthood, and escalating political attacks from all three branches of the federal government aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/02/21/new-york-times-planned-parenthood/

The Forgotten—and Incredibly Important—History of the Abortion Pill

Mifepristone took longer to get approved than most drugs—but not because it was unsafe.

Nina Martin, Mother Jones
Feb 7, 2025

At his Senate confirmation hearings to head the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surprised no one by admitting that he planned to order a new review of the safety of abortion pills. While Kennedy claimed that President Donald Trump has not taken a position—yet—on medication abortion, “he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues,” Kennedy said. “And I’ll ask [agencies] to do that.”

This, of course, is exactly what anti-abortion groups have been pushing for. Since 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, abortion opponents have been ramping up unfounded claims that mifepristone and misoprostol are dangerous. Their efforts have included a flurry of letters to the new administration, explicit directives in the far right’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, and a barrage of ever-more-extreme lawsuits and state bills.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/abortion-pill-forgotten-history-attacks-mifepristone-ru486-anti-abortion-extremists-new-book/

07.02.2025

Commentary

abortion pills

Abortion Pills: US History and Politics

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Feminist Majority Foundation

Food and Drug Administration

manual vacuum aspiration

Reproductive Health Technologies Project

Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies

Roussel-Uclaf

RU-486

Searle

Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Company

shield laws

telehealth abortion

telehealth clinics

telemedicine abortion

USA – One Thing the Failed Attempt to Ban the Abortion Pill Did

The more anti-abortion activists attacked mifepristone, the more women flocked to use it.

BY CARRIE N. BAKER
JUNE 18, 2024

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, that tried to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone based on false allegations that the medication was dangerous. The justices ruled that the plaintiffs—anti-abortion doctors and dentists who had never prescribed mifepristone and hadn’t treated women who had used the medication—did not have legal standing to bring the case. In a moment when the high court is understood to be highly politicized, the 9–0 ruling stood out as definitive, confirming the legality of the medication nationwide.

Although some evidence indicates that the case spread disinformation about the safety of abortion pills, the suit had unintended consequences. The demonization efforts have wound up being one giant publicity campaign for a medication that, for so many years, most women didn’t even know was an option.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/abortion-pill-case-taught-women-about-mifepristone.html

A Moral Justification for Civil Disobedience to Abortion Bans

Fighting for better laws and challenging bad laws are critical parts of the fight for the freedom and dignity of women and pregnant people—but so is the underground abortion pill movement, which enacts that freedom and dignity directly

May 6, 2024
CARRIE N. BAKER, Ms. Magazine

Over the last several years, in response to abortion bans and restrictions, advocates around the country have developed an alternative supply network for abortion pills outside of the medical system and the law. As a lawyer and law-abiding citizen, I recommend people follow the law. If they don’t like a law, I recommend challenging it, either in the courts or legislatures. But when voter suppression and gerrymandering have skewed the political system in a way that has led to laws that do not represent the majority nor protect vulnerable groups from harm, civil disobedience may be the morally right and just thing to do.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/05/06/civil-disobedience-abortion-bans/

06.05.2024

Martin Luther King Jr.

USA – The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Biggest Fear

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
MARCH 25, 2024

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case that could determine national access to mifepristone, one of two pills used as part of medication abortion. In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Carrie N. Baker, whose book, History and Politics of Abortion Pills in the United States, is being published by Amherst College Press this year.

Lithwick and Baker discussed the anti-abortion movement’s decadeslong efforts to target the abortion pill, how those efforts hampered FDA approval of the medication in the first place, and how having easier access to reproductive care through a pill that can be sent in the mail and taken at home fundamentally threatens the strategy of those seeking to dismantle abortion rights in this country. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/abortion-pill-supreme-court-preview-mifepristone-history.html

Abortion pill mifepristone: An explainer and research roundup about its history, safety and future

Amid pending court cases and ballot initiatives, journalistic coverage of medication abortion has never been more crucial. This piece aims to help inform the narrative with scientific evidence.

by Naseem S. Miller
November 1, 2023

Access to mifepristone, a medication that’s used for the safe termination of early pregnancy, hangs in the balance while the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether to take up a case that could determine the legal future of the abortion medication.

In August, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mifepristone should not be prescribed past the seventh week of pregnancy, prescribed via telemedicine, or shipped to patients through the mail. In September, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to consider a challenge to that ruling.

Continued: https://journalistsresource.org/health/mifepristone-research-roundup/

Supreme Court Reinstates Barriers to Abortion by Telemedicine

The Court requires in-person visits for patients seeking medication abortion despite the risks of COVID-19.

Mar 15, 2021
Carrie N. Baker

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a Trump Administration request to reinstate a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule requiring patients seeking a medication abortion to make a medically unnecessary in-person visit to their health care provider to pick up the abortion pill mifepristone.

The Court’s decision in FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reverses a federal district court ruling from last July that suspended the FDA rule during the pandemic. In that lower court decision, Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that the FDA’s required in-person visit imposed a “substantial obstacle” to abortion health care that is likely unconstitutional.

Continued: https://www.theregreview.org/2021/03/15/baker-supreme-court-reinstates-barriers-abortion-telemedicine/