While the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet accepted the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine’s case against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the high court already has involved itself by temporarily blocking a federal appellate court decision that would restrict the use of the abortion pill mifepristone. (Getty Images)
When the U.S. Supreme Court destroyed Roe v. Wade and ended federal protection for abortion care, they threw our nation into a reproductive health care crisis. They galvanized Michiganders and people across the country to fight back by passing ballot initiatives to protect our reproductive freedoms.
We’ve shown anti-abortion groups and politicians just how deeply unpopular their positions are — but after initially knocking them off their feet, they’ve regrouped. Many are pretending they’ve even turned a new leaf — but we know they’re using the same old playbook.
Poll after poll shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. When given the opportunity to use their voices, Americans have made their priorities clear by passing every pro-abortion referendum put before them since 2022. With ten more states set to consider codifying abortion rights this year, we’re already witnessing abortion opponents laying the land mines we’ll be navigating the next few years.
As we continue to navigate this crisis, we must call out their tactics and traps for what they are: attempts to brazenly gaslight the American public and disguise their true intentions by shifting their language to appear “moderate.”
Since the Dobbs decision, nearly two dozen states have passed total or near-total bans on abortion, taking away abortion access and basic reproductive care from tens of millions of people and forcing health care providers to work under threat of criminal charges. Worse, anti-abortion politicians intentionally wrote these restrictive laws with ambiguous language, muddying the legality of care under narrow “exceptions” such as rape, incest, a person’s life, or threats to major bodily functions — exceptions that they’ve denied even to people in the most extreme circumstances.
It’s very clear that the architects never intended for people to actually qualify for exceptions and included them on paper only to create an appearance of being “reasonable.” These dangerous laws were deliberately designed to cause confusion and have a chilling effect on patients and health care providers — and they’re doing precisely that. And as we’ve already seen in two Georgia cases and one in Indiana, people are dying.
How is the anti-abortion faction shifting its language? First, they tried to trumpet their support for a “national abortion ban,” which they initially defined as a complete ban on all abortion care with no exceptions. But they quickly realized that the American public is overwhelmingly against them. In fact, only 8 percent of Michiganders support a ban with zero exceptions, according to the Michigan-based polling research group EPIC-MRA. So anti-abortion groups and politicians had to find a new phrase to hide behind. They are now rebranding abortion bans, insisting they are simply “minimum national standards.”
But we can’t be fooled. A “minimum national standard” banning abortion after 8 or 12 or 15 weeks gestation — or any other timeline arbitrarily chosen by politicians — is still a nationwide ban, plain and simple.
Even the mere fact that they’ve baited people into arguing about gestational ages and situational exceptions is a distraction. Abortion is not about when the government should take away people’s right to an abortion, and it’s not about what situations are valid reasons for needing an abortion.
The conversation about abortion is really about who: Who should be able to control whether people can get the abortions they need? The reality is that at no point during a pregnancy are politicians qualified to have a say in the medical decisions we make with our doctors and our families.
Similarly, we see anti-abortion politicians refusing to answer whether they supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to release the floodgates and allow people to die because of state abortion bans. They’ll dodge and say they support “states’ rights” to determine the issue for themselves. We know the real reason is because the anti-abortion strategy is to divide and conquer. And remember that “states’ rights” is the same excuse Confederate politicians used to whitewash the cause of the Civil War and deny that it was about Southern states clinging to their economy built on the enslavement of Black people.
In a similar vein, anti-abortion politicians today are pretending they care about “states’ rights” and giving the issue “back to the people” — knowing full well they already control the levers of power in state capitals. They care nothing about direct democracy, given the lengths to which politicians across the country are going to deny people a voice by fighting to keep abortion off the ballot. Some, like Florida, are even employing intimidation tactics, where police are being sent to knock on the doors of Floridians who signed petitions to get abortion on the state ballot this year; the state health department has launched a “Florida is Protecting Life” website telling people “don’t let the fearmongers lie to you;” and the state is threatening TV stations for running an ad that supports the ballot measure. “States’ rights” is merely a smokescreen to hide the fact that the anti-abortion minority is using states as incubators to test new ways to enact a nationwide abortion ban, particularly through lawsuits that will eventually make it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The messaging war has always been central to abortion opponents’ strategy over the last 50 years. At every opportunity, they’ve worked to control the conversation by invoking personal religious arguments, rejecting standard medical terms about procedures and inventing emotionally charged propaganda, and promoting shame, stigma, and other false narratives around people who need abortions. We often see their biased terminology and stigmatizing phrases repeated in headlines and mirrored by our leaders, even those who support reproductive freedom, which speaks to how insidious and effective messaging wars can be if we don’t call them out.
So how do we fight back? By being confident in our convictions, calling opponents out for their tricks, and reminding ourselves not to adopt their framing of the issue.
They call themselves the “pro-life” movement, for instance. But there is nothing pro-life about creating a culture where people needlessly die because they’re scared to seek needed medical care. And there is nothing pro-life about unapologetically passing laws that have led to skyrocketing maternal and infant death rates, killing pregnant people and newborns. The movement is anti-abortion, not pro-life.
And while we’ve historically referred to ourselves as the “pro-choice” or “reproductive rights” movement, you may have noticed a shift in recent years to more people simply saying “abortion.” By avoiding the word abortion, we perpetuate the stigma and the shame that anti-abortion groups have so forcefully promoted — and according to research from the World Health Organization, stigma doesn’t just create shame and silence around abortion; it actually worsens health care quality. So I encourage you to say “abortion” — because abortion is health care. Abortion is safe. Abortion is common. And abortion is a foundational piece of the broader spectrum of reproductive care.
Looking to the future, when you see folks backpedaling on their anti-abortion positions and hiding behind new language, call it out. When you hear someone use stigmatizing language, call them in. And when our leaders tell us what their values are, make sure you’re listening carefully — and critically.
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