Amanda Zurawski, Josh Zurawski, Kaitlyn Joshua and Hadley Duvall speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Ill., on Aug. 19, 2024. (Andrew Roth for Michigan Advance)
Galvanized by a pivotal election almost two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections, patients, doctors, and activists in 2024 fought for renewed and expanded reproductive rights, while others pushed for more restrictions. These are some of the people and organizations that impacted reproductive health law and abortion access this year.
Women with wanted pregnancies affected by abortion bans
In state legislatures, before Congress, in court, in presidential campaign ads, and on stage at the Democratic National Convention, women all over the country have been reliving some of the worst moments of their lives in an effort to roll back abortion restrictions that have changed reproductive health care in America.
The year after Kentucky banned abortion, Hadley Duvall started talking publicly about how she was raped at 12 by her stepdad, who got her pregnant. She advocated for abortion rights in re-election campaign ads for Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in 2023 and this year appeared in national campaign ads for Democrats.
Kaitlyn Joshua, of Baton Rouge, represented many Louisiana women at this year’s Democratic National Convention, telling what’s becoming an increasingly common story of not being able to access miscarriage treatment after the state passed a strict abortion ban. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill subsequently challenged Joshua’s story on social media.
Kristin Lyerly, an OB-GYN from Wisconsin, is one of many doctors across the country who have sued over state abortion bans they say have changed medical practice. Lyerly this year participated in a civic engagement experiment in Madison, where strangers came together and shared the life experiences that inform their abortion views. Even when abortion rights were protected under Roe v. Wade, Lyerly said she was almost forced to give birth to a stillborn, in lieu of a less invasive abortion procedure. She also ran a reproductive-rights-focused campaign as a Democrat in a conservative-leaning congressional district, a race she lost.
Allie Phillips ran as a Democrat for a seat in the Tennessee legislature after the state’s abortion ban kept her from terminating a nonviable pregnancy in her home state, leading her to travel to New York City for care. She lost the race but said in November that she plans to continue fighting for reproductive rights, and announced her new pregnancy. Phillips is a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit with other affected women and physicians to clarify the state’s medical health exceptions. A three-judge panel ruled in October that doctors cannot be penalized for performing an emergency abortion to save a patient’s life.
Amanda Zurawski developed sepsis in Texas after her water broke at 18 weeks and doctors waited for days to terminate her pregnancy, fearing prosecution under the state’s strict abortion ban. She’s since become an outspoken abortion-rights advocate. She campaigned heavily for abortion-rights candidates this year and said she wants to continue working in politics.
The Charlotte Lozier Institute
The high-profile federal lawsuit over medication abortion was made possible in part by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the anti-abortion political powerhouse Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Data from the institute featured prominently in the plaintiffs’ case for revoking the federal drug approval of mifepristone and was directly used as part of U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s reasoning for granting the doctor-plaintiffs’ standing. The researchers found a significant jump in Medicaid-funded emergency room visits following a medication abortion over two decades, which also corresponds with an increase in access to medication abortion overtime. Public health experts told States Newsroom that the researchers inflated their findings, and appeared to conflate all emergency department visits with serious adverse events like sepsis. Their conclusions contradicted a large body of research showing a low rate of serious adverse events after taking mifepristone, prompting further scrutiny from curious scientists, as well as the academic publishing house that published it.
In February, Sage retracted three studies produced by Charlotte Lozier researchers and published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology between 2019 and 2022, after a reader-prompted investigation found flaws in the studies’ methodology and data representation. The team behind the studies included Charlotte Lozier vice president and director of data analytics James Studnicki and longtime anti-abortion researchers, including the then-CEO of one of the plaintiff groups in the medication abortion lawsuit. They sued Sage, saying the retractions were unjustified and politically motivated.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the abortion medication lawsuit this past summer — not on the merits of the case, but on the issue of the doctor-plaintiffs’ standing. Anti-abortion activists vowed to find a different plaintiff who could potentially persuade the court that abortion pills are too dangerous. After the Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower court, in October, intervening states Idaho, Kansas and Missouri amended their complaint, which no longer cites the retracted studies papers but instead cites a new paper from Studnicki and fellow Charlotte Lozier researchers, making similar claims.
The Alabama Supreme Court
A common fertility treatment, in vitro fertilization, was thrust into the national spotlight in February after the Alabama Supreme Court decided, 8-1, that frozen embryos should be considered children, in a wrongful death lawsuit over the embryos’ accidental destruction.
A lower court had dismissed the claim, ruling that embryos do not meet the legal definition of children. But in the majority opinion siding with the couples who sued the Mobile fertility clinic, Justice Jay Mitchell cited a 2018 state constitutional amendment ensuring “the protection of the rights of the unborn child.” He also cited an 1872 law allowing for civil lawsuits for the wrongful death of children, and argued that it does not explicitly include an exception for frozen embryos. Mitchell reasoned that the law “applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation.” Chief Justice Tom Parker, an influential conservative Christian activist, cited biblical texts in his concurring opinion, writing, “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
Soon after, many IVF clinics in Alabama shut down until the state legislature passed a bill in March that extended criminal and civil immunity to IVF clinics for operations. This created major issues for families spending tens of thousands of dollars on a time-sensitive treatment. Alabama’s ruling also created a fear among families struggling to conceive in other states with abortion bans and showed that the fertility treatment is broadly supported by voters from both political parties. Republicans updated their national party platform to include support for IVF access. During his presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised: “your government will pay or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with I.V.F. treatment” — something he likely couldn’t do without congressional action. Meanwhile, GOP members of Congress have largely opposed IVF protections and access bills.
Mark Lee Dickson and Jonathan Mitchell
This year, attorney Jonathan Mitchell and pastor Mark Lee Dickson together experimented with ways to prevent out-of-state abortions, using their home state of Texas as the primary testing ground. Mitchell, a former solicitor general of Texas, used a little known state rule to depose abortion funds, doctors, and women who left the state for an abortion. As the Texas Tribune reported, the actions created fear and confusion but have not resulted in charges. Mitchell previously filed a wrongful death lawsuit against women who allegedly helped their friend obtain medication to terminate a pregnancy, which has since been dropped.
Through their Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn project, Dickson and Mitchell helped pass approximately 80 ordinances in cities and counties, mostly in Texas, but also in strategically located cities in abortion-access states, like Illinois and New Mexico. Some of the ordinances say a doctor in a state where abortion is legal cannot perform an abortion on a resident who lives in a town that has passed one of these laws. Some of the ordinances ban the use of that town’s highways to drive someone to an out-of-state abortion clinic. And some invoke a dormant federal anti-obscenity law known as the Comstock Act, which they say the federal government should enforce to mean that abortion pills cannot be transported through the mail.
Just like Texas’s 2021 six-week abortion ban that Mitchell and Dickson helped design, many of these ordinances are unenforceable by the governments that pass them, instead allowing for private citizens to sue other residents or medical professionals for “aiding and abetting” an abortion. The activists experienced a major loss on Election Day with the majority of voters in conservative Amarillo, Texas, voting down a ballot measure blocking abortion-related travel on its highly trafficked roads. But just before the end of the year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York doctor for prescribing abortion drugs to a Texas resident, which Dickson told States Newsroom is a win for the anti-abortion movement. He said that in 2025 he plans to push for local anti-abortion ordinances in Arizona and Missouri, which reversed their abortion bans in November.