Lessons from Bay Area Radical Abortion Defense

Abortion defenders and activists showed Angela Hume the inherent contradiction in the anti-abortion movement: it purports to protect women while actively harming them. Hume coins the term “violent care” to explain this contradiction and points to…

A militant wing of the anti-abortion movement has long looked to the 19th century anti-slavery abolitionists for inspiration and guidance, organizing under the banner of “abortion abolitionists.” This movement distinguishes itself from the self-…

Inform Your Resistance Season 1: Episode 1

Abortion abolitionists: who are they, what drives them, and how do their tactics overlap with those of other far-right movements? Join host, Koki Mendis, and PRA Senior Research Analyst, Cloee Cooper, as we reveal the chilling facts about this…

Anti-abortion Politics in the Americas

Opposition to reproductive and sexual rights is at the heart of authoritarian and theocratic politics around the world, including in the United States. The Trump-Pence administration worked hard to build a…

Author Q&A with Suzanne Pharr

In Arkansas in 1981, inspired by The Combahee River Collective Statement released in the 1970s, activist Suzanne Pharr founded The Women’s Project, an organization that worked across rural and urban communities to bring about social change.…

Enduring the End of Roe and Thwarting an Accelerated Push Toward Authoritarianism

For much longer than 50 years, individuals who should be free have been made to endure the cruelty of courts. On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that for now, bodily autonomy is not a protected freedom, instead giving states greater…

This May, Texas passed a law deputizing citizens to sue anyone who aids another in obtaining an abortion after six weeks, and rewarding those whose court challenges are successful with $10,000 in attorney fees. This clever and destructive law is the…

Under the perceived threat of a Democratic administration stymieing the war of attrition against reproductive rights, the anti-abortion movement continues to strategize for a post-Roe future. From the growth of the abortion abolitionist movement to…

The city of Spokane, Washington sits at the eastern edge of the state—a mountain range and a cultural world away from the Pacific coast. It looks eastward to Idaho and Montana, and south to Eastern Oregon, where far-right secessionist movements have…

Far-Right Candidates Reveal Where the GOP is Headed

While the Trump administration is over, part of its legacy is helping carve a place for 21st Century far-right movements and ideologies in the halls of government and within Republican ranks that look more like 19th Century…

President Trump’s third and most recent appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, clearly opens the door for new strategies, messaging, and rhetoric by the anti-abortion movement. But it’s also a moment the movement has long…

Anti-Abortion “Abolitionists” Go to City Hall

In the spring of 2019, a steady stream of young, White men began appearing at Raleigh, North Carolina City Council meetings to speak on behalf of the “pre-born.” Sometimes the men appeared with their elementary school-aged children, who read pre-…

This directory lists the current prochoice and reproductive justice elements of organized religion in the United States. It is intended primarily as a resource for those seeking to support these values in light of contemporary legislative and…

There is a vast prochoice religious community in the United States that could provide the moral, cultural, and political clout to reverse current antiabortion policy trends in the United States. Most, but not all, of this demographic are Christians…

On March 20, Ohio became the first state to use the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to ban abortions, with the state’s attorney general calling pregnancy terminations “non-essential” health services.1 After Ohio opened that door, anti-choice…

After the 2010 census, Michigan’s Chamber of Commerce worked to gerrymander the state’s districts to ensure a permanent Republican, business-friendly legislative majority. The effort worked so well that, according to the Brennan Center for Justice,…

Looking at the past year’s congressional votes could make it seem like the most serious threat facing the nation is a rampage of violent and unethical medical professionals pressuring pregnant people into post-viability abortions, mismanaging the…

How the Christian Right Built Capacity to Undo Roe State By State

Executive Summary The progressive movement and advocates for reproductive rights, health, and justice have been caught off guard by a movement that has adapted to a changing political, social, and cultural landscape. The Christian Right has remained…

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday evening signed a bill into law intended to ban nearly all abortions and criminalize physicians who provide abortion care, and hours later the Missouri state senate approved legislation that ban abortions after…

Trump’s Rebranding of Abstinence-Only

In a private session intended to set language for gender equality policies and to brief non-governmental organizations on U.S. priorities for women’s issues, a senior advisor from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Bethany Kozma…

Human Life International (HLI) is a Catholic organization with a long history of vicious and hyperbolic attacks on LGBTQ and reproductive rights. It opposes contraception, in-vitro fertilization, comprehensive sex education, and abortion in all…

As we mark the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, two facts about the current abortion patient population in the U.S. are especially striking. First, that patients are disproportionately poor, with half living below the official poverty line and…

On November 2, federal Judge Lee Yeakel began hearing arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton, a lawsuit challenging Texas’s new ban on Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) abortions. Yeakel’s hearing is just the first step in a process that is…

In June 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-abortion TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) law that threatened to shutter all but a handful of the state’s clinics by requiring them to meet costly ambulatory surgical center…

One of the underreported aspects of the current smear campaign against Planned Parenthood is the coarsening and polarizing of our civil discourse that usually accompanies discussions of the culture wars. This has been especially glaring because the…

Anti-abortion Catholic Democrats have long sought to cast their cause as progressive, but their actions have taken them into common cause with the Religious Right. This tendency has been on display during the brouhaha over the publication of the…

Last November, Colorado voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have defined personhood as inclusive of fetuses. This victory for reproductive rights, however, was won amid a slew of attacks on Coloradans’ reproductive freedom. Now,…

The real result of the anti-abortion movement — if not the intended goal — is to punish women for terminating pregnancies.

Nearly 30 years later, anti-abortion activists still work from Joe Scheidler’s blueprint. Could Scheidler’s story provide any clues to where the faults might lie in their strategy?

When I decided to search for #SexEd on Twitter, looking for coverage of sex education, I wasn’t expecting to see activity from Live Action, Lila Rose’s anti-choice organization. But I quickly realized the tweets related to the slew of emails from…

While “Gosnell” didn’t break the Veronica Mars record, the campaign did surpass its stated goal before ending yesterday at $2,241,043.

“Rape survivors should not be shamed”: this sounds like a feminist statement. From SlutWalk and StopSlut to less controversially named anti-violence initiatives, denunciations of slut-shaming and victim-blaming are a staple of today’s mainstream…

PRA fellow Rachel Tabachnick is appearing in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone magazine, discussing how the Religious Right has successfully integrated its unpopular social agenda…

As the United States Supreme Court reviews Buffer Zone laws around healthcare clinics today, let’s take a moment to remember one of the worst moments in the fight for women’s reproductive autonomy.

Abortion, Male Victims, and Ultrasounds

A gathering of the NRLC met for several days to strategize. In addition to the typical arguments against abortion, some newer ones were on the docket. Most significantly, the idea that a woman should be required to have an ultrasound before she is…

Back in 2006, Salon.com contributor Michelle Goldberg wrote an article for the Public Eye Magazine discussing the attacks on, and the resiliency of the last standing women’s health clinic in Mississippi. As new developments continue to unfold, the…

Operation Rescue is a militant anti-choice organization functioning out of Wichita, Kansas. It was founded in 1986 by radical fundamentalist Randall Terry who united pro-life activists under the slogan “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it…

At the Family Research Council’s 2012 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., where he was a featured speaker, Ryan Bomberger opened his remarks by saying “I’m as Black as Obama.” He explained that his biological mother was raped, became pregnant,…

Though only in her mid-twenties, Lila Rose is already a seasoned antichoice activist. In 2006, while still a freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles, she started an antichoice publication, The Advocate, which she claims is distributed…

The Charlotte Lozier Institute aims to abolish abortion rights in the United States by recasting antichoice as authentic feminism, promoting incremental antichoice laws, and undermining the work of the prochoice Guttmacher Institute. Though it bills…

During Wednesday’s hearing on Arizona Representative Trent Franks’s proposed 20-week abortion ban, Franks claimed “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Using the same pseudo-scientific reasoning as Todd Akin (who infamously…

Activist Resource Kit

In the 40 years since the passage of Roe v. Wade, the struggle for reproductive justice has evolved and intensified. We must be prepared to deftly confront right-wing attacks and advance reproductive justice for all. The Roe 40th …

Did you know that the Roman Catholic Church used to lean prochoice? This was (shocking) news to most of the attendees of Friday’s screening of The Secret History of Sex, Choice and Catholics–even those who were themselves Roman Catholic.

Those who celebrate the enduring legacy of Roe v. Wade must also be mindful of the barriers to reproductive autonomy that remain. Full article published at Truthout.

An Old Scare Tactic Re-Emerges

This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.…

Continuing Threats to Reproductive Freedom

In the run-up to the August 2009 Congressional recess, TV ads on health care reform hit the airwaves. The Family Research Council’s political action committee launched a five-state effort to squash a comprehensive health care bill with their spot,…

The general approach crystallized over several months in early 1996 when 45 antiabortion and religious right leaders, organized by the neoconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, formally adopted abortion reduction as a series of related…

It didn’t turn out like they had planned. Two decades of political investment by the antiabortion movement and the Religious Right did not result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Even conservative Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged during…

A Warrior With Words

Exactly two months before abortion provider George Tiller was assassinated in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas, Janice Shaw Crouse lent her voice to the chorus of pundits criticizing Tiller’s unwavering support for women who sought his…

The murder of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas raises again the question of what it means to defend life through killing. When militant antiabortionists began bombing clinics and shooting doctors in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement officials looked…

For the leaders and workers of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, attacks from right-wing foes are nothing new. Almost from the moment that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the federation and its clinics have been in the…

From the podium at the Christian Right’s Values Voter Summit in mid-September, National Review Institute’s Kate O’Beirne, 59, pronounced that the “selection of Sarah Palin [as the GOP vice presidential nominee] sounded the death knell of modern…

Thirty-seven-year-old Erik Martin says he got involved in the American Life League shortly after his eight and 10-year-old children came home from their Blacksburg, Virginia, public school several years ago with an illustrated comic book entitled,…

New Theme of Right to Life Committee

They pledged to “Bring life to the heart of America and bring the heart of America to Life.” In 72 workshops, five plenaries, and three worship services, more than 500 members of the National Right to Life Committee gathered in Kansas City, Missouri…

On Tuesday, July 18th, for the first time in ten years, protesters arrived on Dr. Joseph Booker’s block in Jackson, Mississippi. They went door to door, ringing bells and telling people that their neighbor, the state’s last abortion provider, is a…

How Anti-Abortion Myths Feed the Christian Right Agenda

The anti-abortion movement uses B.A.D science and agenda-driven journals to back up false claims about abortions, in an effort to make abortions illegal.

The African American Anti-Abortion Movement

Introduction For those on either side of the abortion debate there are great stakes involved with the outcomes of the upcoming 2004 elections. There could be the possibility of three open vacancies on the Supreme Court within the next few years,…

Reproductive Rights Under Siege

A woman’s ability to control her reproductive decisions—her reproductive rights—involves more than her right to safe and legal abortion. Reproductive rights encompass the right to bear and raise children, the right to access adequate reproductive…

Most of the news coverage of John C. Salvi 3d has portrayed him as a confused person making nonsensical statements alleging conspiracies against Catholics. In fact, almost all of Salvi’s conspiratorial statements echo paranoid scapegoating theories…