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MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report…

+ Four states—California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey—have petitioned the FDA to undo restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, citing the drug’s proven safety record and arguing that the restrictions are unnecessary. Over the last few months, Department of Health and Human Services secretary RFK Jr. has expressed scientifically unfounded doubts about the medication. In April, the ultraconservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published a deeply flawed, non-peer-reviewed “study” about the so-called danger of abortion pills.

+ Some good news out of Montana: This month, the state supreme court struck down three abortion restrictions that Republican lawmakers passed in 2021, ending a years-long legal challenge from healthcare providers and advocates. Abortion is legal in Montana, but the restrictions would have prohibited abortion after 20 weeks, added extra regulations to medication abortions, and required doctors to offer patients the chance to view an ultrasound and listen to a fetal heart tone before confirming their decision to have an abortion.

Let’s not forget what else was sent our way last month …

Tuesday, June 3

Women Could Be Prosecuted for Miscarriages in West Virginia

Women who experience miscarriages in West Virginia could face charges if they bury, flush or otherwise appear to “hide evidence” of their miscarriage under new interpretations of the state’s antiabortion laws, according to Raleigh County prosecuting attorney Tom Truman. He also told WVNS reporter Jessica Farrish that law enforcement could prosecute miscarriages based on a woman’s supposed intention: “If you were relieved, and had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get run over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking, too.”

Truman also implied that women who miscarry will have to proactively prove their innocence so police don’t decide that they intended to abort and prosecute their miscarriage as if it were an abortion. He said women who suffer miscarriages should call 911 in order to avoid being arrested, saying, “Call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say, ‘I miscarried. I want you to know.’”

However, reproductive rights advocates warn that it may be ill-advised for any woman to notify law enforcement of her pregnancy status given recent cases from this year alone of women being prosecuted and imprisoned for miscarriages.

• In March, 24-year-old Selena Chandler-Scott in Georgia was put in prison after suffering a miscarriage. Because she placed the fetal remains in the trash, police arrested her for “abuse of corpse.”
• In May, police released 34-year-old Mallori Patrice Strait, who was arrested in Texas after she miscarried in a public restroom—and then spent five months in prison before the state dropped her charges.

Trump Rescinds Guidelines Requiring Hospitals to Provide Life-Saving Emergency Abortions

Trump rescinded federal guidance under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) that reaffirmed hospitals’ obligation to perform abortions in cases of medical emergencies even in states with abortion bans.

The Biden administration first issued the guidance in 2022 after many state-level abortion bans went into effect when the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. According to Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, “EMTALA has long protected the right to emergency care, including abortion when it is the necessary treatment to stabilize a patient. Stripping away federal guidance affirming what the law requires will put lives at risk.”

At least 10 American women have died in the past three years since Dobbs after being denied abortions that would have saved their lives. Trump’s removal of the federal guidance doesn’t change hospitals’ legal obligations to provide necessary care for patients, but it adds to the fear and confusion doctors in antiabortion states are already experiencing as they worry if they’ll be arrested for providing life-saving care to their patients. By stripping away the guidance, doctors may find themselves in even more legal jeopardy, which Graves noted will also contribute to dangerous delays in providing patients with medical care.

Friday, June 6: Peaceful Protests Erupt Across Los Angeles Amid Trump’s Sweeping ICE Raids

Federal agents have arrested more than 1,600 people in Southern California over the past month. In just the first 10 days of June, ICE arrested 722 people in Los Angeles, according to the Deportation Data Project. More than half of them had no criminal history and some turned out to be U.S. citizens.

As a result, many who fear arrest are choosing to stay at home—including a man from Guatemala with leukemia, who chose to postpone his chemotherapy because he was anxious about going to the hospital. Local businesses have lost regular customers and a church in East Los Angeles reported losing half of its regular attendees as people worry if basic tasks like going to the grocery store or taking their children to school will result in arrest and deportation.

Although the protests in L.A. have been overwhelmingly peaceful, Trump deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to counteract the protests, against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Despite ICE’s presence, Angelenos have been working hard to help their neighbors, with nonprofit organizations delivering food to families choosing to stay at home and offering financial support to workers such as street vendors worried about going to work amid the raids.

Wednesday, June 11: Harvey Weinstein Convicted of Another Sex Crime

In the retrial of his initial 2020 assault case, former film producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of assaulting film producer Mimi Haley, but was acquitted on another count involving model Kaja Sokola. A mistrial was declared on the third charge due to a hung jury. 

“The jury’s verdict provides a measure of justice, but the work is unfinished, and it must continue,” wrote Deborah Tuerkheimer in Ms.

Thursday, June 12: Pennsylvania Mom and Teenager Arrested for Self-Managed Abortion

Police arrested a teenage girl in Pennsylvania for self-managing her abortion, as well as her mother who obtained abortion for her. Abortion is legal in Pennsylvania up to 24 weeks; however, the mother and daughter were arrested for burying the fetus. The arrests echo recent cases of women being charged for how they chose to dispose of their miscarriages, but Selena Chandler-Scott and Mallori Patrice Strait were arrested in Georgia and Texas, both states with notably more severe abortion restrictions than Pennsylvania.

As frequently happens with this kind of case, law enforcement described the case with misleading and sensationalistic language. A release from the Susquehanna Regional Police falsely referred to the fetus as a “baby” and claimed that “an East Donegal Township mother and daughter have been charged with concealing the death of a newborn baby and then abusing its corpse after inducing a dangerous at-home abortion.”

According to Patient Forward co-founder Garin Marschall, quoted in Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day, the mother and daughter “are victims of later abortion stigma and fetal personhood laws, which are being weaponized by the state.”

Saturday, June 14: Pro-Abortion Lawmaker Melissa Hortman Assassinated by Antiabortion Extremist

In the early hours of the morning, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were fatally shot in their home. The man accused of assassinating them is Vance Luther Boelter, an extremist who has professed his violent antiabortion views in “sermons” in evangelical churches in the U.S. and Congo.

Boelter also allegedly went to the home of state Sen. John Hoffman and shot Hoffman and his wife Yvette multiple times; both narrowly survived after emergency surgery. Law enforcement says Boelter appeared outside two additional lawmakers’ homes before they eventually arrested him on the night of Sunday, June 15.

Police found a list in Boelter’s car of more than 50 additional “targets,” including other Democratic officials as well as abortion clinics and leading abortion rights activists. The tragic shooting is part of a wider growing trend of antiabortion violence and political violence more broadly.

Melissa Hortman will be remembered for making history as only the third woman to lead the Minnesota House and for her advocacy work for a range of issues including reproductive justice, climate action, racial equity, child poverty and gun safety.

Minnesotans across the state still turned up to No Kings protests on Saturday despite warnings from law enforcement to stay at home while the shooter was still at large.

Nationwide, between 4 and 13 million people attended No Kings rallies nationwide to protest President Trump’s immigration and economic policies. The rallies coincided with Trump’s Flag Day military parade to emphasize popular disapproval of his authoritarian attacks on civil rights. As the No Kings website states, “The corruption has gone too far. No thrones. No crowns. No kings.”

Tuesday, June 17: New Analysis Shows TikTok Algorithm Promotes Antiabortion Misinformation

When users search for information about medication abortions, TikTok’s search engine is promoting antiabortion propaganda, according to new research from Media Matters.

The analysis shows that when TikTok users search for terms including “medical abortion,” “medication abortion” and “mifepristone,” the top result is a video seemingly trying to deter women from seeking abortion care with misleading information about what the experience of having an abortion is like.

The video’s narrator claims, “What many women aren’t told when they obtain these pills is that they are very likely to see their deceased baby during this process, and he or she will not simply look like a clump of tissue”—even though doctors say that women will likely experience cramping and pass blood clots but not a recognizable embryo.

TikTok promoting antiabortion content coincides with a larger rise in social media misinformation about abortion and birth control. Recent years post-Dobbs have seen a growing trend of young women taking to TikTok and Instagram to warn others against hormonal birth control with scientifically unfounded claims that it causes depression or cancer.

Wednesday, June 18

Trump Administration Cuts National Suicide Hotline for LGBTQ+ Youth

The Department of Health & Human Services released its 2026 budget proposal, which included entirely terminating the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s Specialized Services for LGBTQ+ Youth. Since its implementation in 2022, the program has provided roughly 1.3 million contacts with life-saving counseling services. 

Jaymes Black, CEO of the Trevor Project, a leading suicide prevention nonprofit focused on supporting LGBTQ+ community, said in a statement, “Suicide prevention is about people, not politics. …The fact that this news comes to us halfway through Pride Month is callous—as is the administration’s choice to remove the ‘T’ from the acronym ‘LGBTQ+’ in their announcement. Transgender people can never, and will never, be erased.”

The program will be shut down on July 17, but help is still available—if you need support please reach out to 988, the Trevor Project or TNLR, an organization providing aid to LGBTQ+ individuals struggling with partner abuse. 

Supreme Court Upholds Tennessee Law Restricting Gender-Affirming Care for Minors

In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled Tennessee’s limitations on gender-affirming care for minors did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of 14th Amendment, as the plaintiffs had argued. In the opinion, Chief Justice Roberts cited inconclusive medical studies that deem gender-affirming care “an experimental practice” with “highly uncertain” reliability.

In fact, gender-affirming care has been proven to be safe various times through reliable medical research. Contrary to Roberts’ argument of the treatment’s “uncertainty,” the Court’s ruling allows for the same treatment, such as puberty-blockers, to be used for a cisgender person that it bans for a trans or nonbinary person.

As explained in a webinar from Lawyers for Good Government, the plaintiffs relied on the precedent set by Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, which held that sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act did include that related to sexual orientation and gender identity. However, some legal professionals argue that the 2022 Dobbs decision was a main driving force in the erosion of sex-based protections, even for those unrelated to abortion, which led to Bostock’s precedent to be insufficient in this instance. 

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud, voicing her strong disapproval of the ruling. She wrote, criticizing Roberts’ hypocrisy, that the Court’s decision will cause “irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination,” along with authorizing “untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them.”

Tuesday, June 24: The Third Anniversary of the Dobbs Decision

In the three years since Roe was overturned, abortion has been under constant scrutiny and attack. However, abortion numbers have increased since the Dobbs ruling: In 2022, there were roughly 80,000 abortions per month—that number soared to 95,200 in 2024 according to data released from WeCount. This can be attributed to a stronger telehealth system, changes in access to abortion pills, and a number of other variables.

The majority of Americans continue to oppose the overturning of Roe, as new polling shows nearly 60 percent of Americans support legal abortion. In the years since Dobbs, the gender gap between women’s support for abortion and men’s support has reached a historic high, suggesting an increasing potential for women’s votes to be decisive in the 2026 midterm elections.

Thursday, June 26: Supreme Court Rules South Carolina Can Eliminate State Medicaid Funding for Planned Parenthood

The Court ruled 6-3 in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic that states can exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid because the organization provides abortion care, ruling that Medicaid’s “any qualified provider” provision does not grant patients the full freedom to choose their medical provider. Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent that the decision strips individuals “of a deeply personal freedom: the “ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.”

Though federal Medicaid funding has generally not been allowed to cover costs of abortion care since the Hyde Amendment of 1976, 16 states have created their own abortion funds for Medicaid patients. The Medina ruling will also drastically reduce access to Planned Parenthood’s other healthcare services, including cancer screening, STI testing, vaccinations, and mental health services. 

The case also creates precedent for other conservative states to roll back funding to Planned Parenthood. As noted by Jessica Valenti, this is likely to push abortion-seekers in red states toward crisis pregnancy centers, often-religious antiabortion “clinics.”

Monday, June 30: Senate Bill Allowed to Include Provision to ‘Defund’ Planned Parenthood 

The Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised lawmakers that a ban on Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood can be included in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill and that it does not violate the Byrd Rule. The bill’s language doesn’t specifically mention Planned Parenthood, but is the only organization that it applies to—the culmination of a decades-long push to “defund” the organization. The provision would cut off Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding for one year.

About 40 percent of American women rely on Medicaid to fund childbirth (including nearly 50 percent of births in rural communities) and roughly half of American children get their healthcare through Medicaid. According to Planned Parenthood, losing Medicaid funding would put at least 200 healthcare centers across the country at risk for closure— 90 percent of them in states where abortion is legal. More than 1 million low-income Americans would lose access to care.

“Republicans will stop at nothing in their crusade to take control of women’s bodies,” Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon said in a joint statement. “Republicans are trampling the law to force their extremist ideology onto the American people.”

“Republicans just got the green light to proceed with their destructive effort to defund Planned Parenthood health centers across the country—a crushing blow to the millions of women across America who rely on Planned Parenthood clinics for basic reproductive care,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).